Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on the most important twentieth century writers and thinkers and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art. It discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, Pollock, Read and Sontag.

Key Writers on Art: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to theories of art from Ancient Greece to the end of the Victorian era, written by an international panel of expert contributors. Arranged chronologically to provide an historical framework, the 43 entries analyze the ideas of key philosophers, historians, art historians, art critics, artists and social scientists, including Plato, Aquinas, Alberti, Michelangelo, de Piles, Burke, Schiller, Winckelmann, Kant, Hegel, Burckhardt, Marx, Tolstoy, Taine, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Ruskin,...

To Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tragedy was not solely a literary mode, but a philosophy to interpret the history that unfolded around him. Tragic Coleridge explores the tragic vision of existence that Coleridge derived from Classical drama, Shakespeare, Milton and contemporary German thought. Coleridge viewed the hardships of the Romantic period, like the catastrophes of Greek tragedy, as stages in a process of humanity s overall purification. Offering new readings of canonical poems, as well as neglected plays and critical works, Chris Murray elaborates Coleridge s tragic vision in relation to...

A martial-arts master escapes from a prison camp in wartime China and flees to Malaya. His hopes for a quiet life are dashed when he saves a bus driver from a lynch mob. The master agrees to impart his secrets to five disciples. Although the organisation they found becomes internationally renowned, the arts are almost entirely lost as the initiates succumb to internal squabbling and greed. New in Singapore, Chris Murray tracks down Chan See-meng, favourite disciple of the great Chee Kim Thong. Through dusty Malaysian villages and Shaolin Temple in China, the adventure that begins with...

David Gahr (1922 2008) was tapped by Columbia Records designer John Berg to shoot cover art for Bruce Springsteen s second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. Gahr s earliest photographs of the musician showcase a youthful Springsteen, not even aged twenty-three, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on the eve of a career breakthrough. Gahr befriended the rising star, and over a span of approximately ten years he photographed Springsteen, both on- and offstage. Rare captures include Springsteen recording music, performing at the cramped venue Bottom Line weeks before the release of...