Aby M. Warburg (1866–1929) is recognized not only as one of the century’s preeminent art and Renaissance historians but also as a founder of twentieth-century methods in iconology and cultural studies in general. Warburg’s 1923 lecture, first published in German in 1988 and now available in the first complete English translation, offers at once a window on his career, a formative statement of his cultural history of modernity, and a document in the ethnography of the American Southwest. This edition includes thirty-nine photographs, many of them originally presented as slides with the speech, and a rich interpretive essay by the translator.

Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America translates Aby M. Warburg's seminal study of the "serpent ritual" of the Hopi people, which grew out of a trip to the American Southwest undertaken by Warburg in 1895-1896.

What is American Indian photography? At the turn of the twentieth century, Edward Curtis began creating romantic images of American Indians, and his works—along with pictures by other non-Native photographers—came to define the field. Yet beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, American Indians themselves started using cameras to record their daily activities and to memorialize tribal members. Through a Native Lens offers a refreshing, new perspective by highlighting the active contributions of North American Indians, both as patrons who commissioned portraits and as photographers who created collections. In this richly illustrated volume, Nicole Dawn Strathman explores how indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada appropriated the art of photography and integrated it into their lifeways. The photographs she analyzes date to the first one hundred years of the medium, between 1840 and 1940. To account for Native activity both in front of and behind the camera, the author divides her survey into two parts. Part I focuses on Native participants, including such public figures as Sarah Winnemucca and Red Cloud, who fashioned themselves in deliberate ways for their portraits. Part II examines Native professional, semiprofessional, and amateur photographers. Drawing from tribal and state archives, libraries, museums, and individual collections, Through a Native Lens features photographs—including some never before published—that range from formal portraits to casual snapshots. The images represent multiple tribal communities across Native North America, including the Inland Tlingit, Northern Paiute, and Kiowa. Moving beyond studies of Native Americans as photographic subjects, this groundbreaking book demonstrates how indigenous peoples took control of their own images and distinguished themselves as pioneers of photography.

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As H. Glenn Penny demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. This affinity stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Locating the origins of the fascination for Indian life in the transatlantic world of German cultures in the nineteenth century, Penny explores German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational worlds of American Indian performers. As he traces this phenomenon through the twentieth century, Penny engages debates about race, masculinity, comparative genocides, and American Indians' reactions to Germans' interests in them. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.

This book focuses on Aby Warburg (1866-1929), one of the legendary figures of twentieth century cultural history. His collection, which is now housed in the Warburg Institute of the University of London bears witness to his idiosyncratic approach to a psychology of symbolism, and explores the Nachleben of classical antiquity in its manifold cultural legacy. This collection of essays offers the first translation of one of Warburg's key essays, the Gombrich lecture, described by Carlo Ginzburg as 'the richest and most penetrating interpretation of Warburg' and original essays on Warburg's astrology, his Mnemosyne project and his favourite topic of festivals. Richard Woodfield is Research Professor in the Faculty of Art and Design at the Nottingham Trent University, England. He has edited E.H Gombrich's Reflections on the History of Art (1987), Gombrich on Art and Psychology (1996), The Essential Gombrich (1996), and a volume on Riegl in the Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture series. He is also the General Editor of a new series of books for G+B Arts International, Aesthetics and the Arts. Edited by Richard Woodfield, Research Professor in the Faculty of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

Archaeologies of Modernity explores the shift from the powerful tradition of literary forms of Bildung—the education of the individual as the self—to the visual forms of “Bildung” (from Bild) that characterize German modernism and the European avant-garde. Interrelated chapters examine the work of Franz Kafka, Jean/Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein, and of artists such as Oskar Kokoschka or Kurt Schwitters, in the light of the surge of an autoformation (Bildung) of verbal and visual images at the core of expressionist and surrealist aesthetics and the art that followed. In this first scholarly focus on modernist avant-garde Bildung in its entwinement of conceptual modernity with forms of the archaic, Rumold resituates the significance of the poet and art theorist Einstein and his work on the language of primitivism and the visual imagination. Archaeologies of Modernity is a major reconsideration of the conception of the modernist project and will be of interest to scholars across the disciplines.

The first volume of the new series “European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies” focuses on the relation between the avant-garde, modernism and Europe. It combines interdisciplinary and intermedial research on experimental aesthetics and poetics. The essays, written by experts from more than fifteen countries, seek to bring out the complexity of the European avant-garde and modernism by relating it to Europe’s intricate history, multiculturalism and multilingualism. They aim to inquire into the divergent cultural views on Europe taking shape in avant-garde and modernist practices and to chart a composite image of the “other Europe(s)” that have emerged from the (contemporary) avant-garde and experimental modernism. How did the avant-garde and modernism in (and outside) Europe give shape to local, national and pan-European forms of identity and community? To what extent does the transnational exchange and cross-fertilisation of aesthetic tendencies illustrate the well-rehearsed claim that the avant-gardes form a typically European phenomenon? Dealing with canonised as well as lesser known exponents of modernism and the avant-garde throughout Europe, this book will appeal to all those interested in European cultural, literary and art history.

This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist tradition. Edward Skidelsky traces the development of Cassirer's thought in its historical and intellectual setting. He presents Cassirer, the author of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, as a defender of the liberal ideal of culture in an increasingly fragmented world, and as someone who grappled with the opposing forces of scientific positivism and romantic vitalism. Cassirer's work can be seen, Skidelsky argues, as offering a potential resolution to the ongoing conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities--and between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy. The first comprehensive study of Cassirer in English in two decades, this book will be of great interest to analytic and continental philosophers, intellectual historians, political and cultural theorists, and historians of twentieth-century Germany.