Grasping For Shadows

What's in a shadow? Menace, seduction, or salvation? Immaterial but profound, shadows lurk everywhere in literature and the visual arts, signifying everything from the treachery of appearances to the unfathomable power of God. From Plato to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Welles and Warhol, from Lord of the Rings to the latest video game, shadows act as central players in the drama of Western culture. Yet because they work silently, artistic shadows often slip unnoticed past audiences and critics. Conceived as an accessible introduction to this elusive phenomenon, Grasping Shadows is the first book that offers a general theory of how all shadows function in texts and visual media. Arguing that shadow images take shape within a common cultural field where visual and verbal meanings overlap, William Sharpe ranges widely among classic and modern works, revealing the key motifs that link apparently disparate works such as those by Fra Angelico and James Joyce, Clementina Hawarden and Kara Walker, Charles Dickens and Kumi Yamashita. Showing how real-world shadows have shaped the meanings of shadow imagery, Grasping Shadows guides the reader through the techniques used by writers and artists to represent shadows from the Renaissance onward. The last chapter traces how shadows impact the art of the modern city, from Renoir and Zola to film noir and projection systems that capture the shadows of passers-by on streets around the globe. Extending his analysis to contemporary street art, popular songs, billboards, and shadow-theatre, Sharpe demonstrates a practical way to grasp the "dark side" that looms all around us.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: The Shadow Speaks -- Chapter 2: The Vital Shadow -- Chapter 3: The Look Elsewhere Shadow -- Chapter 4: The Completing Shadow -- Chapter 5: The Independent Shadow -- Chapter 6: City of Shadows -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index

A gentle story about sadness showing that sometimes all you need to feel better is the openness of someone who accepts you as you are.

Once you graduate from the academy, you're guaranteed an assignment. That was what Coura had always known and still believed even as she wasn't certain what position she desired. Unfortunately, her destiny never intended for such a simple life. Her mentor, dark mage master Byron, shows her there is more to the world when they travel to the capital city. However, underlying political manipulation and looming threats teach Coura how fragmented her world really is, and will become. Something frightening awaits as a secret locked away within herself as a child is forced to the forefront when she is confronted by angelic beings unseen for decades. Could her new, supposedly evil power stand up to that of legend? And, despite training with the sword and dark magic her entire life, is Coura truly prepared for the role she was fated to play between the angels and long-forgotten demons?

Of the hundreds of books on the history of our mining fields, this is the only one I know which so neatly combines these two ingredients of history and memoir.Professor Geoffrey BlaineyIn 1975, a young Adelaide teacher, who wanted to write for the theatre, fell in love with a geologist and followed him to the abandoned Tasmanian mining town of Balfour, situated in what is now known as the Tarkine. With another couple and their two small children, they lived the 1970s 'back to the bush' dream while operating a small-scale tin mining plant. Part memoir, part history, this is a lively account-the comedy and tragedy-of life in a remote mining community, in both the early 1900s and between 1975 and 1981.