The Companion provides an accessible critical survey of Western visual art theory from sources in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thought through to contemporary writings.

This anthology of readings related to Western art history explains specific works of art illustrated in Janson's History of Art and De la Croix and Tansey's Gardner's Art Through the Ages in terms of the ideas, beliefs, and concerns of the people and cultures who created the art. It brings a new understanding of art because it shows the social and cultural basis of major works of art through history. The ten sections are Ancient Near East; Egyptian; Aegean; Greek; Etruscan; Roman; early Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic; early Medieval; Romanesque; and Gothic. The readings have been drawn from many areas of intellectual and social history, including religion, philosophy, literature, science, economics, and law. Each selection is preceded by an introductory note, which discusses the readings in terms of its subject and theme, its source and usage, and its relevance to the study of the work of art.

This edited collection provides middle and high school classroom teachers of English language arts, social studies, and other disciplines the inspiration and insight necessary to utilize an arts integration approach in their teaching. Whether you want your students to create documentaries, maps, mixed media, songs, quilts, dances, masks, or a remix of multiple art forms, the point of school can and should be more about how students create their own meaning in powerful ways and harness their creativity for social good. Arts integration is one approach demonstrated to be invaluable in these terms, moving teachers and students into a mindset of ‘what can we create today?’, sure to inject energy into classrooms, learning, and lives. ENDORSEMENTS: "Arts-Integrated theory and practice create a beautiful dance, are quilted together, and even recite a theatrical monologue in this book that takes arts integration in multiple forms and puts it into terms that work for the busy classroom teacher. Written by classroom teachers, passion and professionalism are evident in each chapter as the strategies and stories about them unfold to provide a platform for teachers to grow in their practice and to create vibrant classrooms along the way." — Sean Layne, Focus 5, Inc. "For all of us working in the arts, arts integration is a term that gets thrown around with many competing definitions. The authors have taken all that and made it practical and useful for this generation of learners. This book has the special sauce for making arts integration relevant to student learning and encouraging creativity though practical examples that can and will inspire you to try them out. After reading this book you will want to sing, dance, draw, and make art in your classroom or museum." — Zev Slurzberg, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The book we are happy to introduce here is a product of the 3rd Global Conference Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, Ideas held in Prague, Czech Republic, May 6-8, 2010. The 3rd Global Conference of the 'Intellectuals' project encouraged papers of two main thematic areas: Intellectuals and the End of the Academy; and Cultural Turns.

The end of the Soviet period, the vast expansion in the power and influence of capital, and recent developments in social and aesthetic theory, have made the work of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and social critic Georg Lukács more vital than ever. The very innovations in literary method that, during the 80s and 90s, marginalized him in the West have now made possible new readings of Lukács, less in thrall to the positions taken by Lukács himself on political and aesthetic matters. What these developments amount to, this book argues, is an opportunity to liberate Lukács's thought from its formal and historical limitations, a possibility that was always inherent in Lukács's own thinking about the paradoxes of form. This collection brings together recent work on Lukács from the fields of Philosophy, Social and Political Thought, Literary and Cultural Studies. Against the odds, Lukács's thought has survived: as a critique of late capitalism, as a guide to the contradictions of modernity, and as a model for a temperament that refuses all accommodation with the way things are.