Fixed Ecstasy advances a fundamentally new understanding of Miro's enterprise in the 1920s and of the most important works of his career. Without a doubt, Joan Miro (1893-1983) is one of the leading artists of the early twentieth century, to be ranked alongside such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Pollock in his contributions to modernist painting. Still, Miro's work has eluded easy classification. He is best known as a Surrealist, but, as Charles Palermo demonstrates, Miro's early years in Barcelona and Paris require a revisionist account of Miro's development and his...

The Art of Allegiance explores the ways in which Spanish imperial authority was manifested in a compelling system of representation for the subjects of New Spain during the seventeenth century. Michael Schreffler identifies and analyzes a corpus of "source" material--paintings, maps, buildings, and texts--produced in and around Mexico City that addresses themes of kingly presence and authority as well as obedience, loyalty, and allegiance to the crown.

The Art of Allegiance opens with a discussion of the royal palace in Mexico City, now destroyed but known through...

Museums of the Mind is the first book to explore the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives. Using new categories, Peter McIsaac constructs a critical genealogy using key texts by Johann Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfried Lenz, W. G. Sebald, and Durs Grunbein and...

"Titology," a term first coined in 1977 by literary critic Harry Levin, is the field of literary studies that focuses on the significance of a title in establishing the thematic developments of the pages that follow. While the term has been used in the literary community for thirty years, this book presents for the first time a thoroughly developed theoretical discussion on the significance of the title as a foundation for scholarly criticism.

Though Maiorino acknowledges that many titles are superficial and "indexical," there exists a separate and more complex class of titles that...

Sarah H. Beckjord's Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Bartolome de Las Casas, and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and...

The medieval world does not end in Western Europe, and within the last twenty or so years some of the most stimulating art-historical discoveries have been made in the Near East. Moving beyond the confines of Jerusalem and Carthage, this volume considers the art of Armenia, Ethiopia, Coptic Egypt, Georgia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Mongol East in relation to Byzantium, Cyprus, Italy, and the West. The Christian arts of the Near East, long considered naive and provincial, are now being reconsidered for their complex liturgical and theological significance.

The essays in this...