"Rosa's works began entering major French collections during his lifetime, and many of the passages at the heart of Salvator Rosa in French Literature describe, evaluate, and interpret paintings displayed in the Louvre. Recently, a large hall in the Louvre was named for Salvator Rosa; the painter, once dubbed "bizarre" by some critics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, now holds a very visible place among the great artists enshrined in one of the world's great museums. Salvator Rosa in French Literature provides a comprehensive interpretation of Rosa's work and a clear evaluation of his mark on French literature."--BOOK JACKET.

As dusk fell on a misty evening in 1521, Martin Luther - hiding from his enemies at Wartburg Castle - found himself seemingly tormented by demons hurling walnuts at his bedroom window. In a fit of rage, the great reformer threw at the Devil the inkwell from which he was preparing his colossal translation of the Bible. A belief - like Luther's - in the supernatural, and in black magic, has been central to European cultural life for 3000 years. From the Salem witch trials to the macabre novels of Dennis Wheatley; from the sadistic persecution of eccentric village women to the seductive sorceresses of TV's Charmed; and from Derek Jarman's punk film Jubilee to Ken Russell's The Devils, John Callow brings the twilight world of the witch, mage and necromancer to vivid and fascinating life. He takes us into a shadowy landscape where, in an age before modern drugs, the onset of sudden illness was readily explained by malevolent spellcasting. And where dark, winding country lanes could terrify by night, as the hoot of an owl or shriek of a fox became the desolate cries of unseen spirits.Witchcraft has profoundly shaped the western imagination, and endures in the forms of modern-day Wicca and paganism. Embracing the Darkness is an enthralling account of this fascinating aspect of the western cultural experience.

The promotion of classicism in the visual arts in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Latin America and the need to “revive” buen gusto (good taste) are the themes of this collection of essays. The contributors provide new insights into neoclassicism and buen gusto as cultural, not just visual, phenomena in the late colonial and early national periods and promote new approaches to the study of Latin American art history and visual culture. The essays examine neoclassical visual culture from assorted perspectives. They consider how classicism was imposed, promoted, adapted, negotiated, and contested in myriad social, political, economic, cultural, and temporal situations. Case studies show such motivations as the desire to impose imperial authority, to fashion the nationalist self, and to form and maintain new social and cultural ideologies. The adaptation of classicism and buen gusto in the Americas was further shaped by local factors, including the realities of place and the influence of established visual and material traditions.

Welcome to the 3 Books To Know series, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books. These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies. We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is: French Literature, - Germinal by Émile Zola. - Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. - Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert.This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.

The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys is a fast-paced tale of political intrigue and aristocratic vanity—a romp through 1793 Dublin as Ireland pitches towards the United Irishmen Uprising of 1798. It follows Murrogh O’Brien as he tries to find his way between his nostalgic father, the politically savvy Irish-Italian nun Beavoin O’Flaherty, the dashing flirt, Lady Knocklofty, the idealistic United Irishmen, and his comically old-fashioned aunts, only to be caught up in a sweep of arrests and revelations in the novel’s dramatic fourth volume. The O’Briens’ original footnotes and authorial digressions detail the failure of colonial policy in Ireland, contributing to the novel’s long-standing reputation as a credible historical account of the turbulent 1790s. This Broadview Edition includes extensive historical documents on Irish politics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as a selection of contemporary reviews of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys.

A readable guide to the art of looking at art. There’s an art to viewing art. A sizable portion of the population regards art with varying degrees of reverence, bewilderment, suspicion, contempt, and intimidation. Most people aren’t sure what to do when standing before a work of art, besides gaze at it for what they hope is an acceptable amount of time, and even those who visit galleries and museums regularly aren’t always as well versed as they wish they could be. This book will help remedy that situation and answer many of the most frequently asked questions pertaining to the matter of art in general: When was the first art made? Who decides which art is “for the ages”? What is art’s purpose? How do paintings get to be worth tens of millions of dollars? Where do artists get their ideas? And perhaps the most pressing question of all, have human cadavers ever been used as art materials? (Yup.) The Art of Looking at Art addresses these and countless more of the issues surrounding this frequently misunderstood microcosm, in a highly informative, yet conversational tone. History, fascinating and altogether human backstories, and information pertaining to every conceivable aspect of visual art are interwoven in twelve concise chapters, providing all the information the average person needs to comfortably approach, analyze, and appreciate art. Readers with a background in art will learn a few new things as well. This beautiful full-color book includes 45 full-page reproductions.

Even as Romantic-period authors asserted the importance of telling the unvarnished truth, novelists were deploying narrative glossing in particularly sophisticated forms. The author examines the artistic craft and political engagement of three major women novelists-Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson-whose self-conscious use of glosses facilitated their critiques of politics and society. All three writers employed devices such as prefaces and editorial notes, as well as alternative media, especially painting and drama, to comment on the narrative. The effect of these disparate media, the author argues, is to call the reader's attention away from the narrative itself. That is, such glossing or 'varnishing' creates narrative ruptures that offer the reader a glimpse of the process of fictional structuring and often reveal the novel's indebtedness to a particular historical moment. In spite, or perhaps because, of their being gendered feminine in eighteenth-century rhetorical commentary, therefore, these glosses allow women writers to participate in 'masculine' discussions outside the conventional domestic sphere. Informed by a wide range of archival texts and examples from the visual arts, and highlighting the 1798 Irish Rebellion as a major event in Irish and British Romantic writing, the author's study offers a new interdisciplinary reading of gendered and political responses to key events in the history of Romanticism.