Criminal. Saint. Lunatic. Genius. Muse. Neal Cassady was once described by Jack Kerouac as "more like Dostoevsky than anyone I know." Serving as the model for Kerouac's frenetic hero, the hip, Noble
"This text examines Malcolm X as literary muse for Haki Madhubuti, one of America's premiere poets and essayists. It contributes to scholarship in refiguring Malcolm X as expressive muse; charting how
A beloved icon who put the 'haute' in 'couture' and found success as an actress, a mother and a humanitarian, Audrey Hepburn was an expert in the art of being a woman. The waifish star and muse of Giv
"The story of Wordsworth becoming Wordsworth by writing the fragments and drafts of what would become The Prelude, a personal poem addressed to Coleridge that he kept hidden from the public until his
As American journalism shape-shifts into multimedia pandemonium and seems to diminish rapidly in influence and integrity, the controversial career of H. L. Mencken, the most powerful individual journa
Perhaps while reading Shakespeare you've asked yourself, What exactly is Hamlet trying to tell me? Why must he mince words and muse in lyricism and, in short, whack about the shrub? But if the Prince
These nine essays examine the current state of media aesthetics in the context of the arts. They examine reflexivity and the economy, spectatorship, the moving image in the muse of the self, a contest
Author/artist Hyeon-Ju Lee's The Happiest Tree is a wonderfully emotional story of life and growing up that will pull at the heartstrings of readers. Over the years, the gingko tree that resides outside an apartment building has seen many things. When it was ten, sounds of the Rose piano class filled the ground floor and whistled through its young branches. At fourteen, a growth spurt year, it met Mr. Artist on the second floor whose muse was the tree itself. As the years continue on, the tree encounters many people in the apartment building making memories. Some are happy, some are sad--they're all part of growing up. All part of who we will be in the future.
From one of Vanity Fair’s rising stars comes a brilliant, star-studded portrait of the glamorous and brazen Hollywood artist, muse, and writer Eve Babitz.Hollywood, California in the 60s and 70s
Opera Acts explores a wealth of new historical material about singers in the late nineteenth century and challenges the idea that this was a period of decline for the opera singer. In detailed case studies of four figures - the late Verdi baritone Victor Maurel; Bizet's first Carmen, Célestine Galli-Marié; Massenet's muse of the 1880s and 1890s, Sibyl Sanderson; and the early Wagner star Jean de Reszke - Karen Henson argues that singers in the late nineteenth century continued to be important, but in ways that were not conventionally 'vocal'. Instead they enjoyed a freedom and creativity based on their ability to express text, act and communicate physically, and exploit the era's media. By these and other means, singers played a crucial role in the creation of opera up to the end of the nineteenth century.
The inspiring private gardens of celebrated fashion and design tastemakers, and how these beautiful sanctuaries have influenced their creative work.Mother Nature has always been a grand muse, particul
Called the "mother of beauty" by Wallace Stevens, death has been perhaps the favorite muse of modern poets. From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried
This 1996 book describes a new Henry James who, rather than being paraded as a beacon of high culture, actually expresses a nuanced understanding of, and engagement with, popular culture. Arguing against recent trends in critical studies which locate racial resistance in popular culture, Sara Blair uncovers this resistance within literature and high modernism. She analyses a variety of texts from early travel writing to The Princess Casamassima, The American Scene and The Tragic Muse, always setting the scene through descriptions of key events of the time such as Jack the Ripper's murders. Blair makes a powerful case for reading James with a sense of sustained contradiction and her project absorbingly argues for the historical and ongoing importance of literary texts and discourses to the study of culture and cultural value.
