This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.

The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender reframes the discussion of modernity, space and gender by examining how "modernity" has been defined in various cultural contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how this definition has been expressed spatially and architecturally, and what effect this has had on women in their everyday lives. In doing so, this volume presents theories and methods for understanding space and gender as they relate to the development of cities, urban space and individual building types (such as housing, work spaces or commercial spaces) in both the creation of and resistance to social transformations and modern global capitalism. The book contains a diverse range of case studies from the US, Europe, the UK, and Asian countries such as China and India, which bring together a multiplicity of approaches to a continuing and common issue and reinforces the need for alternatives to the existing theoretical canon.

Imagining Spaces and Places seeks to produce an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and literature studies and other fields of cultural analysis that work with the concepts of space, place and various “scapes”, such as cityscapes, bodyscapes, mindscapes and memoryscapes, as well as the more familiar landscapes. The volume was inspired by new lines of study that underline the experiential and multidimensional aspects of spaces. We explore how art, literature or urban spaces forge “scapes” by imposing or suggesting aesthetic, evaluative or ideological orderings and perceptual as well as emotive perspectives on the “raw material” or on previous ways of spatial worldmaking. We look at the role of cultural and artistic renderings of space in relation to everyday experiences of spaces. We examine how the experiences of places are mediated in various art forms and other cultural discourses or practices and how these discourses contribute to the understanding of particular places and also to understanding space in more general terms. Imagining Spaces and Places is addressed to scholars and teachers working at the intersection of cultural and spatial analyses, as well as to their undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Great collection from for top feminist art historians and thinkers Includes Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal International perspective focusing on gender and race

Although relatively small, the northern countries of Scandinavia have made a disproportionately large contribution to world cinema. Indeed, some of their films are among the best known of all times, including The Seventh Seal, Dancer in the Dark, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And Scandinavian directors are also among the best known, just to mention Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier. But there is much more to the cinema of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland than that, and this book shows us what they have been accomplishing over more than a century from the beginnings of cinema until the present. The Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema shows just how long and busy this history has been in the chronology, starting in 1896. The introduction then describes the situation in each one of the component countries, all of which approached and developed the field in a similar but also slightly different manner. The dictionary section, with over 400 substantial entries, looks at the situation in greater detail, with over 400 substantial entries on major actors, directors and others, significant films, various genres and themes, and subjects such as animation, ethnicity, migration and censorship. Given its contribution to world cinema it is good to finally have an encyclopedia like this which can meet the interests of the scholar and researcher but also the movie fan.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

Artists and the Practice of Agriculture maps out examples of artistic practices that engage with the aesthetics and politics of gathering food, growing edible and medicinal plants, and interacting with non-human collaborators. In the hands of contemporary artists, farming and foraging become forms of visual and material language that convey personal and political meanings. This book provides a critical analysis of artistic practices that model alternative food systems. It presents rich academic insights as well as 16 conversations with practicing artists. The volume addresses pressing issues, such as the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human beings, the weight of industrial agriculture, the legacy of colonialism, and the promise of place-based and embodied pedagogies. Through participatory projects, the artists discussed here reflect on the links between past histories, present challenges, and future solutions for the food sovereignty of local and networked communities. The book is an easy-to-navigate resource for readers interested in food studies, visual and material cultures, contemporary art, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

This collection explores the cultural fascination with social media forms of self-portraiture, "selfies," with a specific interest in online self-imaging strategies in a Western context. This book examines the selfie as a social and technological phenomenon but also engages with digital self-portraiture as representation: as work that is committed to rigorous object-based analysis. The scholars in this volume consider the topic of online self-portraiture—both its social function as a technology-driven form of visual communication, as well as its thematic, intellectual, historical, and aesthetic intersections with the history of art and visual culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of photography, art history, and media studies.

The world that shaped Europe's first national sculptor-celebrities, from Schadow to David d'Angers, from Flaxman to Gibson, from Canova to Thorvaldsen, was the city of Rome. Until around 1800, the Holy See effectively served as Europe's cultural capital, and Roman sculptors found themselves at the intersection of the Italian marble trade, Grand Tour expenditure, the cult of the classical male nude, and the Enlightenment republic of letters. Two sets of visitors to Rome, the David circle and the British traveler, have tended to dominate Rome's image as an open artistic hub, while the lively community of sculptors of mixed origins has not been awarded similar attention. Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, c.1770?1825 is the first study to piece together the labyrinthine sculptors' world of Rome between 1770 and 1825. The volume sheds new light on the links connecting Neo-classicism, sculpture collecting, Enlightenment aesthetics, studio culture, and queer studies. The collection offers ideal introductory reading on sculpture and Rome around 1800, but its combination of provocative perspectives is sure to appeal to a readership interested in understanding a modernized Europe's overwhelmingly transnational desire for Neo-classical, Roman sculpture.