Explores the transformative reign of the Catholic King James VII and the revolution that brought about his fall

Hieroglyphs were far more than a language. They were an omnipresent and all-powerful force in communicating the messages of ancient Egyptian culture for over three thousand years. In this exciting new study, Penelope Wilson explores the cultural significance of hieroglyphs with an emphasis on previously neglected areas such as cryptography and the continuing deciphering of the script in modern times.

Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, rather than collaboration.

Ezra Pound, the poet called «the contemporary of our grandchildren», has exercised enormous influence on the development of American poetry and criticism. This impact on the world of letters is only grudgingly acknowledged today, since it comes from a poet tainted by fascism and anti-Semitism. This book follows the contours of our love for his poetics and hate for his politics, juxtaposing Pound's work to postmodern theory. The contrasts prevail: in the relation of language to reality, in the moral and political commitments, and in the vision of history. At the same time, Pound's poetic practices, particularly his collage techniques and «series of Englishes», overflowed his political ideology. It is this overflow that makes him so fascinating to intellectuals and the main reason we study his work with respect now.

Modern pioneers - Matisse - Picasso - Modernism - Art in Europe trough to World War I - Modernism between the two World Wars - Transatlantic modern - Art of the real - Pop Art - Minimalist painting and sculpture - Contemporary Art - Modern art since 1970.

From the time when archaeologists first began to discover the civilization's spectacular ruins, Mexico's Mayan past has been a boundless source of inspiration, ideas, and iconography for the modernist imagination. This study examines the ways artists, architects, filmmakers, photographers, and other producers of visual culture in Mexico, the United States, Europe, and beyond have mined Mayan history and imagery. Beginning his study in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first mechanically reproduced and mass distributed images of the Mayan ruins, and ending with recent works that address this history of representation, Lerner argues that Maya modernism is the product of an ongoing pan-American modernism characterized by a continuing series of reinterpretations, collaborations, and exchanges in which Yucatecans, Mexicans and foreigners, mestizos, Mayas, and others all participate and are free to endorse, misunderstand, reinterpret, or reject each other's ideas.