Reading Hardy's Landscapes locates the essential energy of the novels in the descriptive details as much as in the story. The emphasis is on the author's habits of vision and imagination. It is instinctive in Hardy to locate his tales between the huge abstractions of time and space and the minute particularities of nature - a leaf, a minnow, a gnat. His human dramas unfold in a landscape and are part of that landscape, caught up in larger patterns of movement and change.

In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s. Observing that the sense of grandeur and destiny that once shaped French identity has eroded under the weight of recent history, Greene examines the ways in which French cinema has represented traumatic and defining moments of the nation's past: the political battles of the 1930s, the Vichy era, decolonization, the collapse of ideologies. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of films and directors, she shows how postwar films have reflected contemporary concerns even as they have created images and myths that have helped determine the contours of French memory. This study of the intricate links between French history, memory, and cinema begins by examining the long shadow cast by the Vichy past: the repressed memories and smothered unease that characterize the cinema of Alain Resnais are seen as a kind of prelude to a fierce battle for national memory that marked so-called rétro films of the 1970s and 1980s. The shifting political and historical perspectives toward the nation's more distant past, which also emerged in these years, are explored in the light of the films of one of France's leading directors, Bertrand Tavernier. Finally, the mood of nostalgia and melancholy that appears to haunt contemporary France is analyzed in the context of films about the nation's imperial past as well as those that hark back to a "golden age," a remembered paradis perdu, of French cinema itself.

In every part of the world, in every generation, the landscape and environment have fascinated and inspired artists. They have expressed their feelings through paintings, or altered their surroundings by making gardens or sculptures. Whatever forms their creations have taken, artists have managed to capture their visions of the environment for us to share. This book explains how art styles have developed through time, and how artists' techniques add to our understanding of their work. The subject of war and conflict is captured in a wide range of media, including photography, painting, sculpture, posters, textiles, and film. The information to help interpret works of art and understand the time in history in which they were created are included in this book.

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), Living Screens reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, it contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualized as a “plastic” form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties, and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

We seem to see melodrama everywhere we look—from the soliloquies of devastation in a Dickens novel to the abject monstrosity of Frankenstein’s creation, and from Louise Brooks’s exaggerated acting in Pandora’s Box to the vicissitudes endlessly reshaping the life of a brooding Don Draper. This anthology proposes to address the sometimes bewilderingly broad understandings of melodrama by insisting on the historical specificity of its genesis on the stage in late-eighteenth-century Europe. Melodrama emerged during this time in the metropolitan centers of London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin through stage adaptations of classical subjects and gothic novels, and they became famous for their use of passionate expression and spectacular scenery. Yet, as contributors to this volume emphasize, early melodramas also placed sound at center stage, through their distinctive—and often disconcerting—alternations between speech and music. This book draws out the melo of melodrama, showing the crucial dimensions of sound and music for a genre that permeates our dramatic, literary, and cinematic sensibilities today. A richly interdisciplinary anthology, The Melodramatic Moment will open up new dialogues between musicology and literary and theater studies.

The American West of myth and legend has always exerted a strong hold on the popular imagination, and the essays in Reading the West examine some of the basis of that fascination. Reading the West, first published in 1996, is a collection of critical essays by writers, independent scholars and critics on the literature of the American West in the last two centuries. It showcases new ways of reading and understanding western writing. Arguing for the importance of 'place' in literature, these essays explore what makes representative literary works 'western'. They also explore the multicultural and ecological dimensions of western writing. This volume helps enrich our understanding of a distinguished body of literary work which has sometimes been unjustly ignored. It deals not only with literature but with the changing conception of the West in the American imagination.

DID YOU KNOW THAT • we have more hair follicles than a chimpanzee • a male boxer in top condition can punch with the force of a thirteen-pound mallet swung at twenty miles an hour • the best human endurance runners can outlast a horse • one odor above all is sexually stimulating to the human male: cinnamon buns • our home-building skills compare nicely with those of the bagworm With dry wit and penetrating insight, science journalist Hannah Holmes casts the eye of a trained researcher and reporter on . . . herself. And on our whole species. She compares the biology and behavior of humans with that of other creatures, exploring how the human animal fits into the natural world. Holmes also reveals the ways in which Homo sapiens stands apart from other mammals (and all other animals) in ways that are alternately admirable and devastating. Deftly mixing personal stories with the latest scientific research, Hannah Holmes has fashioned an engaging field guide to that oddest and most fascinating of primates: ourselves.

With the continual growth of the world's urban population, biodiversity in towns and cities will play a critical role in global biodiversity. This is the first book to provide an overview of international developments in urban biodiversity and sustainable design. It brings together the views, experiences and expertise of leading scientists and designers from the industrialised and pre-industrialised countries from around the world. The contributors explore the biological, cultural and social values of urban biodiversity, including methods for assessing and evaluating urban biodiversity, social and educational issues, and practical measures for restoring and maintaining biodiversity in urban areas. Contributions come from presenters at an international scientific conference held in Erfurt, Germany 2008 during the 9th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biodiversity. This is also Part of our Conservation Science and Practice book series (with Zoological Society of London).

Landscape architect Lake Douglas employs written accounts, archival data, historic photographs, lithographs, maps, and city planning documents -- many of which have never been published until now -- to explore public and private outdoor spaces in New Orleans and those who shaped them. Public Spaces, Private Gardens, an informative stroll through the last two hundred years of the designed landscapes and horticultural past of New Orleans, offers a fresh look at the cultural landscape of one of America's most interesting and historic cities.

The notion of mode is critical in the reevaluation of melodrama. As a mode, melodrama appears not only as a dramatic genre pervaded by sensationalism, exaggerations, and moral polarities, but also as a cultural imaginary that shapes the emotional experience of modernity, characterized by anxiety, moral confusion, and the dissolution of hierarchy. Despite its usefulness, the notion of mode remains mystifying: What exactly are modes and how do they differ from genres? Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects argues that, whereas genres divide a universe in terms of similarities and differences, modes express or modify an indivisible whole. This study contends that the melodramatic mode is concerned with the expression of the social whole in terms of suffering. Zarzosa explains how melodrama is not a cultural imaginary that proclaims the existence of a defunct moral order in a post-sacred world, but an apparatus that shapes suffering and redistributes its visibility. The moral ideas we associate with melodrama are only a means to achieve this end. To develop this conception of melodrama, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television offers a novel conceptualization of the following aspects of melodrama theory: affect, interpretation, exchange, excess, sacrifice, and coincidence. These aspects of melodrama are coupled with the analysis of classic melodramas (Home from the Hill and The Story of Adele H.), contemporary films (The Piano, Safe], and Year of the Dog), and television series (Torchwood and Lost). Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television provides an essential new look at melodrama and its function in popular culture and media.