A Century in Crisis

A Century in Crisis PDF Author: Julia F. Andrews
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780892072743
Category : Art, Chinese
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Edited by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen. Essays by Jonathan Spence, Xue Yongnian and Mayching Kao.

A Century in Crisis

A Century in Crisis PDF Author: Julia F. Andrews
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780892072743
Category : Art, Chinese
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Edited by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen. Essays by Jonathan Spence, Xue Yongnian and Mayching Kao.

Global Crisis

Global Crisis PDF Author: Geoffrey Parker
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189192
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 944

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Book Description
The acclaimed historian demonstrates a link between climate change and social unrest across the globe during the mid-17th century. Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses—the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and severity. The effects of what historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. In this meticulously researched volume, historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who experienced the many political, economic, and social crises that occurred between 1618 to the late 1680s. He also incorporates the scientific evidence of climate change during this period into the narrative, offering a strikingly new understanding of the General Crisis. Changes in weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.

Zombies in Western Culture

Zombies in Western Culture PDF Author: John Vervaeke
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 178374331X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture. The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it. The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie. Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

Art in Crisis

Art in Crisis PDF Author: Hans Sedlmayr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351531093
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The history of art from the early nineteenth century on- ward is commonly viewed as a succession of conflicts between innovatory and established styles that culminated in the formalism and aesthetic autonomy of high modernism. In Art and Crisis, first published in 1948, Hans Sedlmayr argues that the aesthetic disjunctures of modern art signify more than matters of style and point to much deeper processes of cultural and religious disintegration. As Roger Kimball observes in his informative new introduction, Art in Crisis is as much an exercise in cultural or spiritual analysis as it is a work of art history. Sedlmayr's reads the art of the last two centuries as a fever chart of the modern age in its greatness and its decay. He discusses the advent of Romanticism with its freeing of the imagination as a conscious sundering of art from humanist and religious traditions with the aesthetic treated as a category independent of human need. Looking at the social purposes of architecture, Sedlmayr shows how the landscape garden, the architectural monument, and the industrial exhibition testified to a new relationship not only between man and his handiwork but also between man and the forces that transcend him. In these institutions man deifies his inventive powers with which he hopes to master and supersede nature. Likewise, the art museum denies transcendence through a cultural leveling in which Heracles and Christ become brothers as objects of aesthetic contemplation. At the center of Art in Crisis is the insight that, in art as in life, the pursuit of unqualified autonomy is in the end a prescription for disaster, aesthetic as well as existential. Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The lost center of his subtitle is God. The dream of autonomy, Sedlmayr argues, is for finite, mortal creatures, a dangerous illusion. The book invites serious analysis from art cri

Spain's Centuries of Crisis

Spain's Centuries of Crisis PDF Author: Teofilo F. Ruiz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444342703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
A comprehensive history that focuses on the crises of Spain in the late middle ages and the early transformations that underpinned the later successes of the Catholic Monarchs. Illuminates Spain's history from the early fourteenth century to the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1474 Examines the challenges and reforms of the social, economic, political, and cultural structures of the country Looks at the early transformations that readied Spain for the future opportunities and challenges of the early modern Age of Discovery Includes a helpful bibliography to direct the reader toward further study

State and Society in 21st Century China

State and Society in 21st Century China PDF Author: Peter Hays Gries
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134321260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Written by a team of leading China scholars, this book explores the dynamics of state power and legitimation in twenty-first century China, and the implications of changing state-society relations for the future viability of the People's Republic. Key subjects covered include: the legitimacy of the Communist Party state-society relations ethnic and religious resistance rural and urban contention nationalism popular and youth culture prospects for democracy.

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Thomas N. Bisson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400874319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
Medieval civilization came of age in thunderous events like the Norman Conquest and the First Crusade. Power fell into the hands of men who imposed coercive new lordships in quest of nobility. Rethinking a familiar history, Thomas Bisson explores the circumstances that impelled knights, emperors, nobles, and churchmen to infuse lordship with social purpose. Bisson traces the origins of European government to a crisis of lordship and its resolution. King John of England was only the latest and most conspicuous in a gallery of bad lords who dominated the populace instead of ruling it. Yet, it was not so much the oppressed people as their tormentors who were in crisis. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century suggests what these violent people—and the outcries they provoked—contributed to the making of governments in kingdoms, principalities, and towns.

Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-century China

Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-century China PDF Author: Chun-shu Chang
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472085286
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Describes the social and cultural transformation of seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Li Yu

Baroque Seville

Baroque Seville PDF Author: Amanda Wunder
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 027107941X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

Conservatism and Crisis

Conservatism and Crisis PDF Author: David J. Rosner
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739175521
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
What happens to a culture when it’s most basic assumptions are questioned and rejected, but no new ones are offered to replace them? This book critically analyzes anti-modernist philosophy, the (perhaps futile) attempt to recover traditional worldviews and belief systems in order to cope with the void of meaning engendered by the upheavals of modernity. The textual focus of this book is interwar Germany, as it provides a dramatic and relatively recent example of cultural crisis, with a rich philosophical literature. The writings of Heidegger, Junger, Spengler, and others are discussed in detail. Key themes will be applied to our contemporary post-modern condition as well. The book examines the dangers of anti-modernism, both past and the present, but also discusses some of its implicit appeals.