Bridging Traditions explores the connections between apparently different zones of comprehension and experience—magic and experiment, alchemy and mechanics, practical mathematics and geometrical mysticism, things earthy and heavenly, and especially science and medicine—by focusing on points of intersection among alchemy, chemistry, and Paracelsian medical philosophy. In exploring the varieties of natural knowledge in the early modern era, the authors pay tribute to the work of Allen Debus, whose own endeavors cleared the way for scholars to examine subjects that were once snubbed as suitable only to the refuse heap of the history of science.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.7 (A-), University of Tubingen (New Philology), language: English, abstract: [...] Usually when we encounter such a book we try to solve those problems with the help of literary strategies and approaches like literary theory, reading about the author and the epoch, studying of interpretations of the work , deconstructing the text and looking at the effects of the text with regard to us readers. Besides these literary strategies, which lead to an interpretation of the text, a linguistic analysis of literary texts helps us either to get a full understanding of the text or to comprehend why we have problems understanding the text. However, the linguistic analysis of literature is not an interpretation; it is more an explanation of how it means and why it means what it does. Linguistics demonstrates why a text is interpreted in this or that way and makes clearer what the underlying problems in the interpretation are.The main aim of this essay is to show and explain the linguistic strategies and mechanisms that enable us to bridge the cultural differences, to demonstrate how cultural knowledge is triggered off and to show how it is possible to learn something about the culture The goal of this essay is to show that readers can understand the text although they have no knowledge of the culture at all. In the first part of this work I will settle the question why it is difficult for us to understand the culture behind the text and give a brief account of the problems with which we are confronted in the process of learning about the culture in the book. In the second and third passage I will introduce and settle the theoretical basis of linguistic strategies that help us to understand the text and to reconcile the cultural contrasts. The following part will show the practical application of the linguistic strategies with examples of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

This is the first book-length study to reconstruct the role of women in the epic poems of the Flavian period of Latin literature. Antony Augoustakis examines the role of female characters from the perspective of Julia Kristeva's theories on foreign otherness and motherhood to underscore the on-going negotiation between same and other in the Roman literary imagination as a telling reflection on the construction of Roman identity and of gender and cultural hierarchies.

Art and the Historical Film provides an important examination of fine art's impact on filmmaking, grappling with the question of authenticity. From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.