Selected by "Choice" magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Sweeping across scholarly disciplines, "Back to Nature" shows that, from the moment of their conception, modern ecological and epistemological anxieties were conjoined twins. Urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism, colonialism, revived Skepticism, empirical science, and optical technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and reality itself in the seventeenth century. Literary and visual arts explored the resulting cultural wounds, expressing the pain and proposing some ingenious cures. The stakes, Robert N....

Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957) is widely regarded as the greatest film adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. This fascinating interpretation of the film explores how Kurosawa draws key philosophical and psychological arguments from Shakespeare, translates them into strong visual metaphors, and inflects them through the cultural history of Japan.