Theater of cruelty

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H. Paul Varley

A survey of the history of cultural life in Japan from the earliest times to the present. Beginning with the first glimmerings of civilised life in the remote past, the author traces the development through the ages of religion, thought, literature, theatre, the visual arts, and other forms of culture and art. He also provides a discussion of Japan in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the cultural consequences of Japan's defeat in World War II, the postwar development of arts and literature, and Japanese adaptation of Western forms and technology in architecture and films.

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[edited by] Neil Kagan, Stephen G. Hyslop

Personal writings and recollections of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Patton, as well as letters composed by soldiers at battle and diaries of women serving in the military at home, present an absorbing narrative that tells the entire history of the war from several perspectives.

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Donna Cassidy

"At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), author Donna M. Cassidy appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark later art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region - the North Atlantic folk, the Maine coast, and Mount Katahdin - producing work that demands an interpretive approach beyond art history's customary biographical, stylistic, and thematic methodologies.". "In Marsden Hartley, Cassidy, sensitive to the psychological and gender analysis traditionally central to interpretations of Hartley, becomes the first scholar to reassess his late work in light of contemporary American perceptions of race, ethnicity, place, and history. This new book resonates not only as a seminal Hartley study and a complex art and cultural history, but as an example of applied early twentieth-century American intellectual history informed by an impressive command of primary and secondary interdisciplinary literature. Numerous rich illustrations, as well as transcriptions of several key essays by Hartley - some never before published, including "This Country of Maine" (1937-38) - round out this revolutionary treatment."--BOOK JACKET.

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Peter B. Hales

"First published in 1984, Silver Cities rapidly became a classic in the history of photography and in the then-nascent field of visual culture studies. Now this vastly expanded edition presents a lively interdisciplinary history of the first century of urban photography in America. Silver Cities envisions the transformation of American civilization via mass-produced and mass-disseminated photography of cities made between 1839 and the onset of World War II. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban photographers were visual explorers of the rapidly evolving urban sphere, but their understanding of that environment was defined by the prevailing cultural prejudices. To examine their visual products is to educate ourselves in the deepest concerns of American culture in the century of its transformation from agrarian youth to urbane maturity. Readers new to the book will find a richly illustrated cultural history of American photography, with familiar names and newly discovered figures. Those familiar with the original will find the new edition fresh and surprising, exploring issues of race, gender, and ethnic identity and analyzing the ways media contribute to the power of the dominant culture. Longer and broader in its scope, with a vastly expanded collection of illustrations, the new edition surveys cities small and large, delves deeper into the twentieth century, and gives names to once-anonymous contributors and locations to once-mysterious places."--