The Criminal Baroque

TEMPORARY Bergman looks at the representation of criminals in early modern Spanish theatre and the connection between criminality, the portrayal of criminal heroes on stage, and public displays of law enforcement within and outside the playhouse. His main purpose is to see to how Baroque spectacle (a term of art in theatre that refers to a particular event, often in expressions of popular culture) appears either to align itself, work against, or be independent of the social means of control of the day. His main argument is that that the propaganda power of early modern Spanish spectacle has been vastly overstated. Ted L. L. Bergman is a Lecturer in Spanish, University of St Andrews.

In this provocative revisionist work, Evonne Levy brings fresh theoretical perspectives to the study of the "propagandistic" art and architecture of the Jesuit order as exemplified by its late Baroque Roman church interiors. The first extensive analysis of the aims, mechanisms, and effects of Jesuit art and architecture, this original and sophisticated study also evaluates how the term "propaganda" functions in art history, distinguishes it from rhetoric, and proposes a precise use of the term for the visual arts for the first time. Levy begins by looking at Nazi architecture as a gateway to the emotional and ethical issues raised by the term "propaganda." Jesuit art once stirred similar passions, as she shows in a discussion of the controversial nineteenth-century rubric the "Jesuit Style." She then considers three central aspects of Jesuit art as essential components of propaganda: authorship, message, and diffusion. Levy tests her theoretical formulations against a broad range of documents and works of art, including the Chapel of St. Ignatius and other major works in Rome by Andrea Pozzo as well as chapels in Central Europe and Poland. Innovative in bringing a broad range of social and critical theory to bear on Baroque art and architecture in Europe and beyond, Levy’s work highlights the subject-forming capacity of early modern Catholic art and architecture while establishing "propaganda" as a productive term for art history.

Essays compare early modern Spanish writers to their contemporaries in other countries and to modern Spanish and Latin American literature

Playwriting Intensive takes a fresh approach to playwriting—putting dialogue first. Castagno shows novice playwrights how to use language to generate character and structure. His decades of experience teaching and writing have resulted in a fresh, informed pedagogy designed to get students off to the right start and progressing quickly. Castagno emphasizes learning by process through the text, encouraging readers to experiment and familiarize themselves with the best practices provided. His lessons focus on the skills contemporary playwrights will use in their careers, including promoting diversity both through featured examples and dedicated exercises.

The narrative unfolds from a casual visit by the narrator Jack Tate to an exhibition on baroque painting in a gallery in London, when the adventures of Kurupira, a mythical figure of an Amazon Forest goblin with inverted feet and defender of the forest, begin, who offers himself as squire to the greatest English philosopher of this century, Sir Roger Scruton, and seizes his soul during his stay in Brazil. They fight against the 12 evil dragons that inhabit the vast Brazilian territory, symbols of the corruption of the 12 biggest Western moral values.Sir Roger is part of a successor group of the 12 knights of the legendary Round Table, along with Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, Karl Popper, Mario Ferreira dos Santos, Isaiah Berlin, and Russell Kirk, dedicated to the liberal- conservative cause in a world still dominated by baroque-leftist infidels.This is a timely allegory on the civilizing impasse in the Western world, and its influence on the Latin world, especially on Brazil, as a mediator of the voracity of the Chinese Dragon. Because only Brazil, a country that lives immersed under the most resilient baroqueism, as a culture of torsion and distortion of human reason, knows how to decipher Kurupira’s trails.

Law and Order Special Victims Unit (SVU) is more popular than any other American police procedural television series, but how does its unique focus on sex crimes reflect contemporary popular culture and feminist critique, whilst also recasting the classic crime narrative? All-American TV Crime Drama is the first dedicated study of SVU and its treatment of sexual violence, gender and criminality. The book uses detailed textual and visual analyses of episodes to illuminate the assumptions underpinning the programme. Although SVU engages with issues pertaining to feminism and gender it still relies upon traditional and misogynistic tropes such as false rape charges and the monstrous mother to undermine positive views of the feminine. The show, and its backdrop, New York City thus become a stage on which national concerns about women, gender roles, the family and race are carried out. Moorti and Cuklanz unpack how the show has become a crucible for examining current attitudes towards these issues and include an analysis of its reception by its many fans in over 30 countries.

Suicide by Proxy became a major societal problem after 1650. Suicidal people committed capital crimes with the explicit goal of “earning” their executions, as a short-cut to their salvation. Desiring to die repentantly at the hands of divinely-instituted government, perpetrators hoped to escape eternal damnation that befell direct suicides. Kathy Stuart shows how this crime emerged as an unintended consequence of aggressive social disciplining campaigns by confessional states. Paradoxically, suicide by proxy exposed the limits of early modern state power, as governments struggled unsuccessfully to suppress the tactic. Some perpetrators committed arson or blasphemy, or confessed to long-past crimes, usually infanticide, or bestiality. Most frequently, however, they murdered young children, believing that their innocent victims would also enter paradise. The crime had cross-confessional appeal, as illustrated in case studies of Lutheran Hamburg and Catholic Vienna.

This book surveys the entire range of crime films, including important subgenres such as the gangster film, the private eye film, film noir, as well as the victim film, the erotic thriller, and the crime comedy. Focusing on ten films that span the range of the twentieth century, Thomas Leitch traces the transformation of the three leading figures that are common to all crime films: the criminal, the victim and the avenger. Analyzing how each of the subgenres establishes oppositions among its ritual antagonists, he shows how the distinctions among them become blurred throughout the course of the century. This blurring, Leitch maintains, reflects and fosters a deep social ambivalence towards crime and criminals, while the criminal, victim and avenger characters effectively map the shifting relations between subgenres, such as the erotic thriller and the police film, within the larger genre of crime film that informs them all.