Mystical Landscapes

This richly illustrated volume explores mystical themes in European, Scandinavian, and North American landscape paintings from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. This book features works by Emily Carr, Marc Chagall, Arthur Dove, Paul Gauguin, Lawren Harris, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh and James McNeill Whistler, among others. Common to their work is the expression of the spiritual crisis that arose in society and the arts in reaction to the disillusionments of the modern age, and against the malaise that resulted in the Great War. Many artists turned their backs on institutional religion, searching for truth in universal spiritual philosophies. This book includes essays investigating mystical landscape genres and their migration from Scandinavia to North America, with a focus upon the Group of Seven and their Canadian and American counterparts. Accompanying an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Musée d'Orsay, this book offers a penetrating look at the Symbolist influence on the landscape genre.

Beyond its housing estates and identikit high streets there is another Britain. This is the Britain of mist-drenched forests and unpredictable sea-frets: of wraith-like fog banks, druidic mistletoe and peculiar creatures that lurk, half-unseen, in the undergrowth, tantalising and teasing just at the periphery of human vision. How have the remarkably persistent folkloric traditions of the British Isles formed and been formed by the psyches of those who inhabit them? In this sparkling new history, Carolyne Larrington explores the diverse ways in which a myriad of fantastical beings has moulded the nation's cultural history. Fairies, elves and goblins here tread purposefully, sometimes malignly, over an eerie landscape that also conceals brownies, selkies, trows, knockers, boggarts, land-wights, Jack o'Lanterns, Barguests, the sinister Nuckleavee and Black Shuck: terrifying hell-hound of the Norfolk coast with eyes of burning coal. Ranging from Shetland to Jersey and from Ireland to East Anglia, while evoking the Wild Hunt, the ghostly bells of Lyonesse and the dread fenlands haunted by Grendel, this is a book that will captivate all those who long for the wild places: the mountains and chasms where giants lie in wait

For scholars exploring the career of American artist Charles Burchfield and the period in which he worked (1893-1967), this book provides access to listings of his exhibitions and museum collections where his art can be found along with books, articles, films, and exhibition catalogs.

In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference. Interweaving a memoir of his mother's long struggle with Alzheimer's and cancer, meditations on his own wilderness experience, and illuminating commentary on the Christian via negativa--a mystical tradition that seeks God in the silence beyond language--Lane rejects the easy affirmations of pop spirituality for the harsher but more profound truths that wilderness can teach us. "There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within." It is this apparent paradox that lies at the heart of this remarkable book: that inhuman landscapes should be the source of spiritual comfort. Lane shows that the very indifference of the wilderness can release us from the demands of the endlessly anxious ego, teach us to ignore the inessential in our own lives, and enable us to transcend the "false self" that is ever-obsessed with managing impressions. Drawing upon the wisdom of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, Edward Abbey, and many other Christian and non-Christian writers, Lane also demonstrates how those of us cut off from the wilderness might "make some desert" in our lives. Written with vivid intelligence, narrative ease, and a gracefulness that is itself a comfort, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes gives us not only a description but a "performance" of an ancient and increasingly relevant spiritual tradition.

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states. Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict. Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity. Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

"For thirty-five years Gary Barwin has been opening up new ways of being in poetry. In this long-awaited new and selected collection, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe, Barwin and his editor, Alessandro Porco, have drawn from his extensive writings in previously published books, chapbooks, small press works, magazine and journal publications, including unpublishing and uncollected works to create this category-defying book. Over the course of the collection Barwin uses a variety of forms and styles to explore themes from aesthetic investigations to questions of identity and culture, from ecopoetics to questions of language. Throughout Barwin stretches language to its fullest extent, whether he's exploring alternative translations or working with images as poems; he continually moves readers from surprise to delight."--

Bringing to life a snapshot of early North American urbanization, Lawren Harris' modernist poetry and urban paintings are featured together for the first time in this unique historical journey. Including previously unpublished poems, this compendium offers a new view of his artistic period preceding the Group of Seven and presents an exciting window into Canadian urban space at the turn of the century. The juxtaposed poetry and paintings compliment each other to provide a unique view into the artistic workings as Harris confronted Toronto's cold underbelly--searching for a metaphor for the poverty that he encountered in the Ward's world.