The carnivalization of politics

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Ilona Bell

""Bell is the only scholar out there who is able to tackle the complexities of Elizabeth's written and reported spoken discourse with the full literary attention that it deserves. Once published, this pathbreaking book will show an entire generation of scholars how to integrate Elizabeth Tudor the writer into our understanding of rhetoric, poetics, and language in the Elizabethan age. The fruits of this heightened attention to the rhetoricity and literariness of Elizabeth's self-presentation are clear. Bell has the potential to change the way we think about Elizabeth's place in the histories of gender, politics, religions, diplomacy--ultimately in history itself."--John Watkins, Professor of English, University of Minnesota" "This book focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth represented herself in her own words, especially in speeches, reported conversations, and private poems from the first half of her reign, a time when she was simultaneously establishing her political authority and negotiating marriage. Her insistence on conducting her own courtships and ruling the country herself whether or not she married provoked widespread discussion and considerable resistance. Her unprecedented art of courtship, expressed in her characteristically witty, enigmatic language and forceful rhetoric, merged with a wider social controversy over conjugal freedom of choice and women's lawful liberty that helped make the Elizabethan era an extraordinarily fertile and creative period in English literature."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

"All the Time in the World proffers a miscellany of customs, traditions, and pleasures people have pursued throughout the ages. An antidote to the contemporary cult of Getting Things Done, the book takes its cue from the medieval books of hours, which prescribed certain readings and contemplations for various parts of the day and year. Full of witty bon mots, interesting etymologies, and arresting anecdotes, the book encompasses an array of cultures and eras including ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, 1930s Shanghai, and the Hollywood Hills of the late 1960s, drifting through the worlds of fashion, beauty, art, food, or travel. Focusing on the glamorous, eccentric, unusual and sublime, subjects covered include: the daylong ceremony of laying a royal Elizabethan tablecloth; the radicalization of sartorial chic in 1890s Paris; Nostradamus' belief in the aphrodisiac power of jam (and the book of recipes he published the same year as his predictions); the sensuous practice of sniffing incense in 15th century Japan; the American fascination with flaming desserts; the short-lived artistic discipline of "lumia," or visual music; the Ottoman Empire's 17th century ban on coffee; the magnetic atmosphere that fueled Parisian highlife in the 1920s; Henriette d'Angeville's fearless ascent of Mont Blanc, armed with 13 guides, 24 roast chickens, and 18 bottles of wine; the elaborate treasure hunts concocted by London's Bright Young Things; and the musical revolution known as bebop. Entertaining, unexpected, and charming, All the Time in the World digs up the forgotten treasures of the past and inspires a passion for good living in the present"--

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Enrica Crispino

Traces the brief and troubled life of van Gogh: his birth in a Dutch village, his travels in Belgium and England, his arrival in Impressionist Paris and his discovery of the delights of the south of France, where he died at 37. Shows how, in spite of suffering mental crises and inner turmoil, van Gogh always continued to search for ways of painting that expressed the true essence of his subjects.

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James Fenton

"James Fenton, one of England's most gifted poets, has in recent years been looking closely at works of art and writing incisively and inventively about them and their creators. Leonardo's Nephew collects fifteen pieces, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, in which he discusses a wide range of painting and sculpture, from the mummy portraits of ancient Egypt and the few surviving works of the fifteenth-century sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio to Seurat's bathers in the Seine, the boxes of Joseph Cornell, and the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns."--BOOK JACKET.