Falling In Love With Statues

"From Greek statues to porcelain dolls to digital avatars, countless generations of artificial humans have fascinated, seduced, and earned the devotion of their flesh-and-blood creators. Falling in Love with Statues reveals that these relationships have played an instrumental role throughout human history in our efforts to understand, improve, and empower ourselves."--Inside jacket.

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This book investigates the wide-ranging connections between sculpture, sexuality, and history in Western culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Sculpture has offered a privileged site for the articulation of sexual experience and the formation of sexual knowledge. As historical objects, sculptures also draw attention to the different ways in which knowledge about sexuality is facilitated through an engagement with the past. Bringing together contributors from across disciplines, including art history, classics, film studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, museum studies, queer theory and reception studies, the volume presents original readings of sculptural art in relation to antiquarianism, aesthetics, collecting cultures, censorship and obscenity, psychoanalysis, sexology, and the experience and regulation of museum spaces. It examines how sculptural encounters were imagined and articulated in literature, painting, film and science. As a whole, the book opens up a new understanding of the ways in which sculptures, as real or imagined objects, have fundamentally shaped approaches to and receptions of the past in relation to sex, gender and sexuality. Chapters 8 and 10 of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

An Economist Best Book of the Year In this timely and lively look at the act of toppling monuments, the popular historian and author of Blood and Sand explores the vital question of how a society remembers—and confronts—the past. In 2020, history came tumbling down. From the US and the UK to Belgium, New Zealand, and Bangladesh, Black Lives Matter protesters defaced, and in some cases, hauled down statues of Confederate icons, slaveholders, and imperialists. General Robert E. Lee, head of the Confederate Army, was covered in graffiti in Richmond, Virginia. Edward Colston, a member of Parliament and slave trader, was knocked off his plinth in Bristol, England, and hurled into the harbor. Statues of Christopher Columbus were toppled in Minnesota, burned and thrown into a lake in Virginia, and beheaded in Massachusetts. Belgian King Leopold II was set on fire in Antwerp and doused in red paint in Ghent. Winston Churchill’s monument in London was daubed with the word “racist.” As these iconic effigies fell, the backlash was swift and intense. But as the past three hundred years have shown, history is not erased when statues are removed. If anything, Alex von Tunzelmann reminds us, it is made. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements and distinguishes between statuary—the representation of “virtuous” individuals, usually “Great Men”—and other forms of sculpture, public art, and memorialization. Nobody wants to get rid of all memorials. But Fallen Idols asks: have statues had their day?

As the first encyclopedia solely devoted to the popular romance fiction genre, this resource provides a wealth of information on all aspects of the subject. Romance fiction accounts for a large share of book sales each year, and contrary to popular belief, not all of its readers are women: roughly 16 percent are men. This enormously popular genre continues to captivate people reading for pleasure, and it also commands a growing amount of academic interest. Included are alphabetically arranged reference entries on significant authors along with works, themes, and other topics. The articles are written by scholars, librarians, and industry professionals with a deep knowledge of the genre and so provide a thorough understanding of the subject. An index provides easy access to information within the entries, and bibliographies at the end of each entry, a general bibliography, and a suggested romance reading list allow for further study of the genre.

This book examines key sculptural motifs and cinematic sculpture in film history through a series of case studies and through an extensive reference gallery of 150 different films.

From antiquity to the present day, this book offers a fascinating insight into the histories, movements and conflicts which have come to shape our world, viewed through the stories of the destruction of 21 statues. Confederate soldiers hacked to pieces. A British slave trader dumped in the river. An Aboriginal warrior twice beheaded. A Chinese philosopher consumed by fire. A Greek goddess left to rot in the desert… Statues stand as markers of collective memory connecting us to a shared sense of belonging. When societies fracture into warring tribes, we convince ourselves that the past is irredeemably evil. So, we tear down our statues. But what begins with the destruction of statues, ends with the killing of people. This remarkable book is a compelling history of love and hate spanning every continent, religion and era, told through the destruction of 21 statues. Peter Hughes’ original approach, blending philosophy, psychology and history, explores how these symbols of our identity give us more than an understanding of our past. In the wars that rage around them, they may also hold the key to our future. The 21 statues are Hatshepsut (Ancient Egypt), Nero (Suffolk, UK), Athena (Syria), Buddhas of Bamiyan (Afghanistan), Hecate (Constantinople), Our Lady of Caversham (near Reading, UK), Huitzilopochtli (Mexico), Confucius (China), Louis XV (France), Mendelssohn (Germany), The Confederate Monument (US), Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada), Christopher Columbus (Venezuela), Edward Colston (Bristol, UK), Cecil Rhodes (South Africa), George Washington (US), Stalin (Hungary), Yagan (Australia), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), B. R. Ambedkar (India) and Frederick Douglass (US). A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues is a profound and necessary meditation on identity which resonates powerfully today as statues tumble around the world.

A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?