After the end

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Robert Hillenbrand

"Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings presents the first comprehensive examination of the interplay between text and image in the celebrated Persian national epic, the Shahnama, written by the poet Firdausi of Tus. The Shahnama is one of the longest poems ever composed and recounts the history of Iran from the dawn of time to the Muslim Arab conquests of the seventh century A.D. There is no Persian text, in prose or poetry, which has been so frequently and lavishly illustrated." "Offering insights through a range of varied art-historical approaches to the Shahnama, the essays in this volume reveal how the subtle alterations in text and image serve to document changes in taste and style and can be understood as reflections of the changing role of the national epic in the imagination of Iranians and the equally changing messages - often political in nature - which the familiar stories were made to convey over the centuries."--Jacket.

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Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn

Examines the evolution, physical characteristics, geographic range, way of life, and disappearance of the mammoth; discussing information culled from studies of fossilized remains, photographs and depictions of mammoths in prehistoric art, and illustrations of them in their habitat.

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Ian Donaldson & Tamsin Donaldson

First sight / Ian Donaldson & Tamsin Donaldson -- The first European depictions / Bernard Smith -- Reactions on Cook's voyage / Glyndwr Williams -- Savage sportsmen / James Urry -- The Darwinian perspective / D.J. Mulvaney -- Hearing the first Australians / Tamsin Donaldson -- Projections of melancholy / Margaret Maynard -- Tom Roberts' aboriginal portraits / Helen Topliss -- Thomas Dick's photographic vision / Isabel McBryde -- The popular image / Nicolas Peterson -- Ordering the landscape / Rhys Jones.

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Debra D. Andrist

"Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The Body, Subject & Subjected illuminates some "selfies." This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures - the Iberian Peninsula to pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America - analyzing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. Chapter contributions address the representation of the body itself as subject, in both visual and textual manners, and illuminate attempts at control of the environment, of perception, of behavior and of actions, by artists and authors. Other chapters address the body as subjected to circumstance, representing the body as affected by factors such as illness, injury, treatment and death. These myriad effects on the body are interpreted through the brushes of painters and the pens of authors for social and/or personal control purposes. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures"--