The Nude Matured: Body and Spirit explores the hidden beauty of aging and the soft sophistication of the beautiful older woman, accepting and often celebrating her desirability in this image-driven age of unachievable perfection. As part of her master's thesis in the MPS Digital Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, photographer Judith Monteferrante collaborated with women over the age of fifty to explore their comfort with aging and the beauty of their bodies. Her evocative, rich images capture the enigma, attraction, mood, and beauty of her subjects with an artistic passion and delicate meticulous eye. This updated edition shares the thoughts and emotions felt by these women during this project. As one woman stated, "I left with the feeling that I had been a participant in something meaningful." This collection presents a series of photographs of women over fifty, embracing the beauty and complexities of the mature female nude figure.

Healthy spirit in a healthy body was the foundational slogan of the physical culture campaign. By the beginning of the 1930s, sports had become one of the most frequently pictured subjects of art. Images of beautiful sportswomen and muscular athletes were widely used by the Soviet mass media. Sportsmen were found on every «collective portrait» of Soviet people; they appeared on almost every significant officially commissioned work, be it a large-scale oil painting for the Soviet exhibition pavilion or decoration in a theater, club, palace of culture, or metro station. They were featured on posters, covers of Soviet magazines, on television news, and even in movies. Soviet textile and porcelain designers widely used sport motifs. In fact, the amount of the sport-related visual material suggests that the images of sports constituted a genre on its own in official Stalinist art. The primary focus of this research is the representation of the sporting body, and the social and ideological forces to which the athlete's body was exposed. This is also an attempt to position the body of the Soviet athlete in the context of Soviet mythology and reconnect it with the greater context of body representation in pre-Bolshevik and late Stalinist traditions.

The landmark photographic survey of the human body at a moment when body image and body politics are being redefined. In a world of selfies and body shaming, Photoshopping and gender fluidity, body image has never been more at the forefront of popular cultural dialogue. Body is a definitive, democratic statement at a time when our fixation with images of the human form is greater than ever before. Curator and art historian Nathalie Herschdorfer brings together over three hundred and fifty images created predominantly in the twenty-first century that explore our relationship with the body. This watershed publication presents work from major names in art photography, including Bettina Rheims, Lauren Greenfield, Cindy Sherman, Viviane Sassen, and Sally Mann, alongside others whose fashion work has shaped our view of the human form, such as Solve Sundsbo and Daniel Sannwald. Interwoven with these major works are images that explore the numerous other ways in which we have represented the body, and the ways in which imaging of the body has been used, shared, and changed over the last quarter-century. Capturing the complex and often paradoxical relationship we have with our bodies—from fantasy to reality and curiosity to obsession—Body is a timely homage to, and introspection of, the human form as it sits in our current culture.

Marie Dicker Haas knew how to make friends and keep themÑand being connected to others was what she treasured most. In this memoir, her spirit shines through, as do her philosophies on life, which she developed over more than 90 years before her death in 2017. From her formative days growing up on Staten Island, New York, to her years at Cornell University, through the World War II years, and on to life as it unfolded, she writes with a thoughtful, creative style. She writes courageously of her loves, including the death of Sammy Greenwald during World War II, which she writes Òaffected me more profoundly than any other event I had experienced until that time.Ó He had been born next door, and heÕd always been in her life. Years later, Marie eloped with a concert violinist who melodiously transformed her life for the next twenty-five years, and two children gave her the opportunity to experience one of her greatest joys: motherhood. She also shares lessons from her greatest challenges.

Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.

Widely acclaimed for her powerful explorations of race, womanhood, spirituality, and mortality, poet Lucille Clifton has published thirteen volumes of poems since 1969 and has received numerous accolades for her work, including the 2000 National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Her verse is featured in almost every anthology of contemporary poetry, and her readings draw large and enthusiastic audiences. Although Clifton's poetry is a pleasure to read, it is neither as simple nor as blithely celebratory as readers sometimes assume. The bursts of joy found in her polished, elegant lines are frequently set against a backdrop of regret and sorrow. Alternately consoling, stimulating, and emotionally devastating, Clifton's poems are unforgettable. In Wild Blessings, Hilary Holladay offers the first full-length study of Clifton's poetry, drawing on a broad knowledge of the American poetic tradition and African American poetry in particular. Holladay places Clifton's poems in multiple contexts -- personal, political, and literary -- as she explicates major themes and analyzes specific works: Clifton's poems about womanhood, a central concern throughout her career; her fertility poems, which are provocatively compared with Sylvia Plath's poems on the same subject; her relation to the Black Arts Movement and to other black female poets, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez; her biblical poems; her elegies; and her poignant family history, Generations, an extended prose poem. In addition to a new preface written after Clifton's death in 2010, this updated edition includes an epilogue that discusses the poetry collections she published after 2004. Readers encountering Lucille Clifton's poems for the first time and those long familiar with her distinctive voice will benefit from Hilary Holladay's striking insights and her illuminating interview with the influential American poet.

Knitting together two fascinating but entirely distinct lives, this ingeniously structured braided biography tells the story of the lives and work of two women, each a cultural icon in her own country yet lesser known in the other's. Australian poet Judith Wright and Canadian painter Emily Carr broke new ground for female artists in the British colonies and influenced the political and social debates about environment and indigenous rights that have shaped Australia and Canada in the 21st century. In telling their story/ies, this book charts the battle for recognition of their modernist art and vision, pointing out significant moments of similarity in their lives and work. Although separated by thousands of miles, their experience of colonial modernity was startlingly analogous, as white settler women bent on forging artistic careers in a male-dominated world and sphere rigged against them. Through all this, though, their cultural importance endures; two remarkable women whose poetry and painting still speak to us today of their passionate belief in the transformative power of art.

This volume brings together some of the papers presented by leading scholars, artists and psychoanalysts at an annual Creativity Seminar organised by the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center. Looking at creativity through a psychoanalytic lens - and very importantly, vice versa - the authors examine great works, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and William Gibson's The Miracle Worker; as well as great artists, such as Van Gogh and Lennon and McCartney, for what we might learn about the creative process itself. Deepening this conversation are a number of clinical studies and other reflections on the creative process - in sickness and in health, so to speak. A central theme is that of "deep play", the level at which the artist may be unconsciously playing out, on behalf of all of us, the deepest dynamics of human emotion in order that we may leave the encounter not only emotionally spent, but profoundly informed as well.

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, ... and Religion

An introduction to the fictions of the Fight Club author, who is both loved and loathed Ever since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a "shock jock" engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk's fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer's outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a "minimalist" writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer's novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante's Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed). Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.