In creative, analytical retellings of biblical tales about women, Aschkenasy demonstrates how recurring situations, dilemmas, and modes of conduct represent the politics of women’s realities in premodern civilization—how women’s lives in those times were characterized by social and legal limitations which some accepted and others challenged.

This book is the third volume in the final report of the cleaning and excavations at the Late Minoan IIIC settlement of Vronda-located near Kavousi in eastern Crete-that were conducted between 1983 and 1992. Detailed analyses of the architecture, pottery, other finds (including figurines and stone tools), and botanical and faunal remains are presented in this volume, along with a complete history of the site and an attempt to reconstruct the social, political, and religious organization of the settlement.

In his first short story collection in five years, Leon Rooke brings together an extraordinary array of documents from diverse hot spots around the world. In an attempt to answer the question What is art?, the stories explore Italian "art," Mexican "art," Gypsy "art," Native "art," and political "art."

What is (a) play? How do Shakespeare's plays engage with and represent early modern modes of play – from jests and games to music, spectacle, movement, animal-baiting and dance? How have we played with Shakespeare in the centuries since? And how does the structure of the plays experienced in the early modern playhouse shape our understanding of Shakespeare plays today? Shakespeare / Play brings together established and emerging scholars to respond to these questions, using approaches spanning theatre and dance history, cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, disability studies, archaeology, affect studies, music history, material history and literary and dramaturgical analysis. Ranging across Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre as well as early modern lost plays, dance notation, conduct books, jest books and contemporary theatre and film, it includes consideration of Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear and The Merry Wives of Windsor, among others. The subject of this volume is reflected in its structure: Shakespeare / Play features substantial new essays across 5 'acts', interwoven with 7 shorter, playful pieces (a 'prologue', 4 'act breaks', a 'jig' and a 'curtain call'), to offer new directions for research on Shakespearean playing, playmaking and performance. In so doing, this volume interrogates the conceptions of playing of/in Shakespeare that shape how we perform, read, teach and analyze Shakespeare today.

Relying on a range of visual and written sources, Gender, Space, and the Gaze offers fresh ways of considering how masculinity and femininity were lived in late nineteenth-century Paris. The book moves beyond shopworn dichotomies, rooted in Baudelaire’s "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), that have shaped scholarship on this period.

Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.

Photographers have been irresistibly drawn to the window as a powerful source of inspiration throughout the history of the medium. As one of the first camera subjects, the window is literally and figuratively linked to the photographic process itself. By bringing together key works, arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and presenting pairings within broader stylistic movements, this volume examines the motif of the window as a symbol of photographic vision. The Window in Photographs includes more than eighty color plates spanning the history of photography, all drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s permanent collection. The theme is presented in a wide range of contexts, from one of the earliest images by William Henry Fox Talbot or Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1864 allegorical use of the motif, to works by members of the Photo-Secession, including Gertrude Käsebier and Fred Holland Day. The documentary thread of the street photographer can be followed in Eugène Atget’s record of the old quartiers of Paris and later twentieth-century photographs by William Eggleston, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander. Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand chose to utilize the theme of the window for its more graphic possibilities. More recently, photographers Shizuka Yokomizo and Gregory Crewdson explored conceptual aspects of the window to investigate themes of voyeurism and invented narrative, while Uta Barth and Yuki Onodera created more abstract visions.

The author investigates the points of contact between literature, visual arts and feminist criticism by offering fresh readings of selected Romantic and Victorian poems about women and a discussion of their wide-ranging visual history – a subject which has not yet been undertaken in a book-length study. The innovative feature of the project lies in its scope and merit: extensive readings of 19th century poetry, informed by carefully chosen critical approaches, are followed by a rich overview and analysis of visual renderings of the poems in question. Łuczyńska-Hołdys has succeeded in bringing to light previously unknown or undiscussed works, and reappraised many well-known paintings and illustrations.

The second installment of the internationally best selling Erik Winter series It's August and the annual Gothenburg Party is in full swing. But this year the bacchanalian blowout is simmering with ethnic discord spurred by nativist gangs. When a woman is found murdered in the park-her identity as inscrutable as the blood-red symbol on the tree above her body-Winter's search for her missing child leads him from sleek McMansions to the Gothenburg fringes, where "northern suburbs" is code for "outsider" and the past is inescapable-even for Sweden's youngest chief inspector. Psychologically gripping and socially astute, The Shadow Woman puts this master of Swedish noir on track to build an American audience on par with his international fame.