From time to time we all tend to wonder what sort of “story” our life might comprise: what it means, where it is going, and whether it hangs together as a whole. In The Stories We Are, William Lowell Randall explores the links between literature and life and speculates on the range of storytelling styles through which people compose their lives. In doing so, he draws on a variety of fields, including psychology, psychotherapy, theology, philosophy, feminist theory, and literary theory. Using categories like plot, character, point of view, and style, Randall plays with the possibility that we each make sense of the events of our lives to the extent that we weave them into our own unfolding novel, as simultaneously its author, narrator, main character, and reader. In the process, he offers us a unique perspective on features of our day-to-day world such as secrecy, self-deception, gossip, prejudice, intimacy, maturity, and the proverbial “art of living.” First published in 1995, this second edition of The Stories We Are includes a new preface and afterword by the author that offer insight into his argument and evolution as a scholar, as well as an illuminating foreword by Ruthellen Josselson.

Instant New York Times bestseller The story of art as it’s never been told before, from the Renaissance to the present day, with more than 300 works of art. How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Guided by Katy Hessel, art historian and founder of @thegreatwomenartists, discover the glittering paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century United States and the artist who really invented the “readymade.” Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of postwar artists in Latin America, and the women defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned and your eyes opened to many artforms often ignored or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan, this is the history of art as it’s never been told before.

Why is the Smithsonian more than the “Nation’s Attic?” Or more than a museum complex? As Wilton S. Dillon shows, the Smithsonian came to be the institution we know today under the twenty-year leadership of “Sun King” S. Dillon Ripley. Ripley aspired to reinvent the Smithsonian as a great university—with museums. Although little understood by the public at large, it began as a basic research center. The Smithsonian remains a key contributor to the world of higher learning and functions diplomatically as the ministry of culture for the United States. Dillon provides backstage insights into Ripley’s quest for the wholeness of knowledge. He describes how he inspired its role as a “theater of ideas as well as artifacts.” Under his tutelage, the National Mall became a playground for world intelligentsia, an “intellectual free trade zone” in the shadow of the nation’s political capital. Dillon reminds us that interdisciplinary, international Smithsonian symposia foreshadowed twenty-first-century issues and trends. His descriptions of the educational rewards of balancing tradition with the avant-garde are inspiring. As Dillon reminds us, Ripley’s twenty-year reign may well have helped spark the waning embers of the Enlightenment.

A three-part mini-series I wrote for the PeteTweets blog.

What happens when the assumptions and practices of museum curators and art educators intersect with the assumptions and practices of publishing for children? This study explores how over three hundred children's picture books, most of them published in the last three decades in English, introduce children to art and art museums. It considers how the books emerge from and relate to a range of theories and assumptions about childhood and childhood development, children's literature and culture, illustration, visual art, museology, and art education. As well as examining how these theories and assumptions influence what picture books teach young readers about visiting museums and about how to look at and think about art, it examines which artists and artworks appear most often in picture books and offers a survey of different kinds of art-related picture books: ones that claim to be purely informational, ones that make looking at art a game or a puzzle, ones in which children visit art museums, and many more. Since the books all include reproductions of or allusions to museum artworks, the study also considers the problems illustrators face in depicting museum artworks in illustrations in a different style.

Asks important questions about the very nature of stories and examines why we read stories rather than just learning the endings.

Disney Stories: Getting to Digital explores how Disney, the man and the company, used technological innovation to create characters and stories that engage audiences in many different media, in particular in Video Games and on the Internet. Drawing on Disney films from the twenties and thirties, as well as the writings of historians, screenwriters and producers, Disney Stories: Getting to Digital explains how new film and animation techniques, many developed by Disney, worked together to evolve character and content development and produce entertaining stories that riveted audiences. Through an insider’s perspective of Disney’s legendary creation process, the book closely examines how the Disney Company moved its stories into the digital world in the 1990s and the virtual, online communities of the 2000s. By embracing the digital era, Disney led storytelling and technological innovation by granting their audience the unique opportunity to take part in their creation process through their online games, including The Lion King Animated Story Book, Disney Blast and Toontown. Disney Stories: Getting to Digital is intended for Disney fans and current practitioners looking to study the creation process of one of the most famous animation studios in existence. Professors teaching courses in new media, animation and interactive storytelling will also find this book a valuable asset.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art explores the links between literature and visual art from classical ekphrasis through to contemporary experimental forms. The collection’s engagement with diverse literary and cultural artifacts offers a comprehensive survey of the vibrant interrelationships that currently inform literary studies and the arts. Featuring four sections, the first part provides an overview of theoretical approaches to art and literature from philosophy and aesthetics through to cognitive neuroscience. Part two examines one of the most important intersections between text and image: the workings of ekphrasis across poetry, fiction, drama, comics, life and travel writing, and architectural treatises. Parts three and four consider intermedial crossings from antiquity to the present. The contributors examine the rich intermedial experiments that range from manuscript studies to infographics in graphic narratives, illuminating the vibrant ways in which texts have intersected with illustration, music, dance, architecture, painting, photography, media installations, and television. Throughout this dynamic collection of 37 chapters, the contributors evolve existing critical debates in innovative new directions. The volume will be a critical resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as specialist scholars working in literary studies, philosophy of art, text and image studies, and visual culture. The Introduction and Chapters 10, 14 and 37 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.