The Triumph of Modernism probes the intricate interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism in the evolution of colonial-era Indian art.

This is a sequel to Richard Viladesau's well-received study, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. It continues his project of presenting theological history by using art as both an independent religious or theological "text" and as a means of understanding the cultural context for academic theology. Viladesau argues that art and symbolism function as alternative strands of theological expression sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of crucifixion and its role in salvation history. This book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West: the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This period was eventful for both theology and art, and thus particularly fruitful for Viladesau's project. Using individual works of art, over sixty of which are reproduced in this book, to epitomize particular artistic and theological models, he explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. To name a few examples, the theologies of Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, and the Council of Trent, are examined in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Cranach, and the Mannerists. In this book, Viladesau continues to deepen our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity.

In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descendants of the lost realm of Atlantis, who had organized themselves to seek “the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Bacon’s make-believe island was not an empire in the usual sense, marked by territorial control; instead, it was the center of a vast general expansion of human knowledge and power. Rosalind Williams uses Bacon’s island as a jumping-off point to explore the overarching historical event of our time: the rise and triumph of human empire, the apotheosis of the modern ambition to increase knowledge and power in order to achieve world domination. Confronting an intensely humanized world was a singular event of consciousness, which Williams explores through the lives and works of three writers of the late nineteenth century: Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As the century drew to a close, these writers were unhappy with the direction in which their world seemed to be headed and worried that organized humanity would use knowledge and power for unworthy ends. In response, Williams shows, each engaged in a lifelong quest to make a home in the midst of human empire, to transcend it, and most of all to understand it. They accomplished this first by taking to the water: in life and in art, the transition from land to water offered them release from the condition of human domination. At the same time, each writer transformed his world by exploring the literary boundary between realism and romance. Williams shows how Verne, Morris, and Stevenson experimented with romance and fantasy and how these traditions allowed them to express their growing awareness of the need for a new relationship between humans and Earth. The Triumph of Human Empire shows that for these writers and their readers romance was an exceptionally powerful way of grappling with the political, technical, and environmental situations of modernity. As environmental consciousness rises in our time, along with evidence that our seeming control over nature is pathological and unpredictable, Williams’s history is one that speaks very much to the present.

The Triumph of the Amateurs is the story of the lost world or professional rowing in America, a sport that attracted crowds of thousands, widespread betting, and ultimately corruption that foretold its doom. It centers on the colorful careers of two New York City Irish boys, the Biglin brothers John and Barney, now long forgotten save for Thomas Eakins's portraits of them in their shell. If the bestseller The Boys in the Boat portrayed the good guys of the U.S.’s 1936 Olympic crew, the Biglins, along with their colleagues and successors, were the Bad Boys in the Boat. Rascals abounded on and off the water, where rowdy fans often outdid modern soccer thugs in violence, betting was rampant—as was fixing—and spectators in the tens of thousands came out to see it all. The Triumph of the Amateurs traces the sport from its rise in the years before the Civil War on through the Gilded Age to its scandalous demise and eventual transition into a purely amateur sport. In addition, Barney Biglin’s later career as holder of sinecures offers a colorful glimpse into late 19th-century New York City political corruption. Illustrated with 40 black and white and color illustrations, including Thomas Eakins's famous paintings of the Biglin brothers rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in 1872.

Once musicians such as Mozart were little more than court servants; now they are multimillionaire superstars wielding more power than politicians. How did this extraordinary change come about? Tim Blanning's brilliantly enjoyable book examines how everything from the cult of the romantic to technology and travel all fed the inexorable rise of music in the West, making it the most dominant and ubiquitous of the art forms. Encompassing balladeers, the great composers, jazz legends and rock gods, this is an enthralling story of power, patronage, creativity and genius.

The Triumph of Augustan Poetics offers an important re-evaluation of the transition from Baroque to Augustan in English literature. Starting with Butler's Hudibras, Blanford Parker describes Augustan satire as a movement away from the 'controversial disputation' of the seventeenth century to a general satire which ridicules Protestant, Anglican and Catholic in equal measure, as well as the poetic traditions that supported them. Once the dominant forms of late medieval and Baroque thought - analogical and fideist, a fully symbolic world and an empty wilderness - were erased, a novel space for the imagination was created. Here a 'literalism' new to European thought can be seen to have replaced the general satire, and at this moment Pope and Thomson create a new art of natural and quotidian description, in parallel with the rise of the novel. Parker's account concludes with the ambiguous or hostile reaction to this new mode seen in the works of Samuel Johnson and others.

From gleaming hardstone statues to bright frescoes, the unexpected and often spectacular Egyptian objects discovered in Roman Italy have long presented an interpretive challenge. How they shaped and were shaped by religion, politics, and identity formation has now been well researched. But one crucial function of these objects remains to be explored: their role as precious goods in a collector’s economy. The Romans imported and recreated Egyptian goods in the most opulent materials available – gold, gems, expensive wood, ivory, luxurious textiles – and displayed them like true treasures. This is due in part to the way Romans encountered these items, as argued in this book: first as dazzling spolia from the war against Cleopatra, then as costly wares exchanged over the expanding Roman trade routes. In this respect, Romans treated Egyptian art surprisingly similarly to Greek art. By examining the concrete mechanisms through which Egyptian objects were acquired and displayed in Rome, this book offers a new understanding of this impressive material at the crossroads of Hellenistic, Roman, and Egyptian culture.

Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.

In a career of public service spanning 30 years, Dr. Leong Che-hung had always been there when Hong Kong people needed him. His faith in serving his own people had taken him from the operating theatre to the Executive Council and Legislative Council representing the medical constituency, and he was successively appointed as the Chairman of the Hospital Authority, the HKU Council and the Elderly Commission, among others. Now, for the first time, Dr. Leong uses each phase of his professional and public career as a spur to reflect on what makes Hong Kong tick. Opinionated, perceptive and often prescient, he tells the inside stories of the city’s most challenging health care crisis and most treasured medical triumphs. Throughout the book, he thinks passionately about many pressing issues facing Hong Kong, and why they are not only challenges but also opportunities. In the end, this is a book more about the history and future of Hong Kong than the life of one of its inhabitants.