Picturing A Different West

Picturing a Different West addresses Willa Cather and Mary Austin as central figures in a women's tradition of the pictured West. Both Cather and Austin moved west in their youth and spent much of their lives there. Cather lived on the Great Plains, while Austin resided in California and the Southwest. Cather's travels repeatedly took her to the Southwest, and she wrote three novels with Southwestern settings. Starting with the masculine tradition of Western art that was prevalent when Austin and Cather launched their careers, Janis P. Stout shows how the authors challenged and revised that tradition. Rather than a West of adventure, violence, and conquest, open only to rugged and daring men, the authors envisioned a new West--not conventionally feminine so much as an androgynous space of freedom for women and men alike. Their vision of an alternative West and their alternative ways of thinking about and portraying gender are inseparable. Placing Cather and Austin alongside contemporaries Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, Stout emphasizes the visual nature of Austin's and Cather's personal experiences of the West and Southwest, their awareness of the prevailing visual representations of the West, and the visual nature of their books about the West, with respect to both prose style and illustrations. In closing, Stout demonstrates the continuance of their tradition in illustrated western books by Leslie Marmon Silko and by Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers.

The more than one hundred images--by well-known photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Laura Gilpin as well as by an array of less familiar ones--places the work of local Arizonans alongside that of federal photographers both to illuminate the impact of the Depression on the state's distinctive racial and natural landscapes and to show the influence of differing cultural agendas on the photographic record. Includes essays by a variety of authors on life in 1930s Arizona and the photographers who documented it.

This book fills these gaps in a striking and original way by means of ten concise thematic chapters which explain the origins of these concepts from the book of Revelation in an accessible way. These explanations are augmented and developed via a carefully selected sample of the ways in which the concepts have been treated by artists through the centuries. The 120 visual examples are drawn from a wide range of time periods and media including the ninth-century Trier Apocalypse, thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Apocalypse Manuscripts such as the Lambeth and Trinity Apocalypses, the fourteenth-century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, fifteenth-century Apocalypse altarpieces by Van Eyck and Memling, Dürer and Cranach's sixteenth-century Apocalypse woodcuts, and more recently a range of works by William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, Max Beckmann, as well as film posters and film stills, cartoons, and children's book illustrations.

Art historian David Lubin examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings both embraced and resisted dominant social values. Lubin argues that artists such as George Bingham and Lily Martin Spencer were aware of the underlying social conflicts of their time and that their work reflected the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child rearing, its racial disharmony, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America.--From publisher description.

For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses. But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian. By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past –– and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.

The vast Canadian landscape has captured the imagination of visual artists since the first European contact. Although artistic engagement with the landscape has a long history, some periods have drawn considerable critical attention, while others have been left almost unexamined. Picturing the Land surveys work from coast to coast, from the earliest maps to postwar painting in English and French Canada, To provide a comprehensive view of Canadian landscape art. Emphasizing the ways in which social, economic, and political conditions determine representation, Marylin McKay moves beyond canonical images and traditional nationalistic interpretations by analyzing Canadian landscape art in relation to different concepts of territory. Taking an expansive and inclusive perspective on Canadian landscape art, McKay depicts this tradition in all its diversity and draws it into the larger body of Western landscape art, broadening the horizon of future study, appreciation, and criticism. Richly illustrated and filled with sophisticated and innovative commentary, Picturing the Land provides new and distinct histories of the landscape art of French and English Canada.

Linking Willa Cather to ?the modern? or ?modernism? still seems an eccentric proposition to some people. Born in 1873, Cather felt tied to the past when she witnessed the emergence of twentieth-century modern culture, and the clean, classical sentences in her fiction contrast starkly with the radically experimental prose of prominent modernists. Nevertheless, her representations of place in the modern world reveal Cather as a writer able to imagine a startling range of different cultures. Divided into two sections, the essays in Cather Studies, Volume 9 examine Willa Cather as an author with an innovative receptivity to modern cultures and a powerful affinity with the visual and musical arts. From the interplay between modern and antimodern in her representations of native culture to the music and visual arts that animated her imagination, the essays are unified by an understanding of Cather as a writer of transition whose fiction meditates on the cultural movement from Victorianism into the twentieth century.ø

Throughout European history, Jews have been associated with commerce and the money trade, rendered both visible and vulnerable, like Shylock, by their economic distinctiveness. This is the story of Jewish perceptions of this economic difference and its effect on modern Jewish identity.