Bulletin Of The John Rylands Library 97 2

The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library is a long-running journal that publishes research complementary to the John Rylands Library's extensive special collections.

The marriage of William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) and Lucy Madox Brown (1843-1894) united two of the most resonant Pre-Raphaelite family names. Their passionate and ultimately tragic relationship - described here for the first time - provides a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century marriage and on the private lives of eminent Victorians. Sibling of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, William was one of the original Pre-Raphaelite 'Brothers,' a Bohemian, radical author, poet, critic, artist, connoisseur, biographer, historian, and taxman. Lucy, the intense, intellectual daughter of Ford Madox Brown, was an ambitious artist and biographer of Mary Shelley in spite of struggling with tuberculosis for nearly a decade. Drawing on hundreds of previously unpublished sources and a wealth of new visual material (including art by William, Lucy, and others of their circle and striking contemporary photographs), the book follows William and Lucy through their separate professional careers, marriage, continental travels, and Lucy’s illness and death. At the crossover between art history, literary criticism, social history, and biography, the book rewrites Pre-Raphaelite history and brings to life two fascinating people who were both of their time and ahead of it.

"Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's reading of Rossetti's illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti's poetics. Her thorough archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti's commitment to illustration and attitudes toward copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced.

Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study also aims to refine knowledge of the various connections between Attic comedy and comic vases from South Italy and Sicily (the so-called 'phlyax vases'). After introducing comic texts and comedy-related vase-paintings in the regional contexts, The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE considers the generic features of the comic body, characterized as it is by a specific ugliness and a constant motion. It also explores how costumes —masks, padding, phallus, clothing, accessories— and gestures contribute to the characters' visual identity in relation with speech : it analyzes the cultural, social, aesthetic, and theatrical conventions by which spectators decipher the body. This study thus leads to a re-examination of the modalities of comic mimesis, in particular when addressing sexual codes in cross-dressing scenes which reveal the artifice of the fictional body. It also sheds light on how comic poets make use of the scenic or imaginary representations of the bodies of those who are targets of political, social, or intellectual satire. There is a particular emphasis on body movements, where the book not only deals with body language and the dramatic function of comic gesture, but also with how words confer a kind of poetic and unreal motion to the body.

Saadya ben Joseph al-Fayyumi (882-942), gaon (head) of the rabbinic academy at Sura and one of the preeminent Jewish thinkers of the medieval period, attempted to create a complete statement of Jewish religious philosophy in which all strands of philosophical thought were to be knit into a unified system. In The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, Saadya sought to rescue believers from a sea of doubt and the waters of confusion into which they had been cast by Christianity, Islam, and other faiths. By employing philosophical--or kalamic--argumentation to examine and defend traditional Jewish beliefs, Saadya hoped to turn blind faith into conviction based on rational understanding. First published in 1946, and reprinted here without alteration, Alexander Altmann's judicious abridgment of his own translation has remained the standard edition of this influential work. A new Introduction by Daniel Frank sets Saadya's work in its broader historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts.

A union list of serials commencing publication after Dec. 31, 1949.