Bøger udgivet af University of Chicago Press

In Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque, eminent musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon rediscovers the composer through an accessible and musically informed biography. Presenting documentation about Vivaldi discovered after the Baroque revival in the 1930s, Robbins Landon explores a fascinating life.

David Halle's idea was simple but radical: to connect culture to everyday life by showing how people actually use the artifacts of culture - paintings, photographs, sculpture - in the most intimate of all settings: the home. In the first book of its kind, Halle gives a fascinating account of the uses and meaning of art for those who buy it and live with it. His study ranges from the affluent town houses on Manhattan's Upper East Side and row houses in blue-collar Brooklyn to middle- and upper-middle class suburbs on Long Island, resulting in an unprecedented portrait of the meanings of art for its primary audience. Are there differences in artistic preferences between social classes or races or between urban and suburban homes? Similarities? How do choices in art works - and the way we display them - speak to our dreams, desires, pleasures, and fears? And what do they say about the real cultural boundaries between elite and popular, high and low? Halle examines landscapes, both priceless heirlooms and mass-produced sunsets; abstract paintings and prints; "primitive" sculpture; and the vibrantly colored portraits of religious art. He also discusses the gatherings of family photographs that fill every home. Inside Culture also explores the architecture and design of the houses, from the eclipse of the formal dining room to the landscape of urban backyards. Refusing easy generalizations about culture and class, Halle shows that art has a different set of meanings outside the rarefied air of museums and galleries. He challenges received opinion about the role of the audience in the history and reception of twentieth-century art to show that the experience of art isn't always what artistsand critics say it is. With floor plans, drawings, and dozens of photographs, this lively book can be enjoyed on many levels. It describes for the first time the way a broad cross section of people live with art. It records for the first time the astonishing variety of artistic experience. And it permanently changes our ongoing conversation about what culture contains, what it controls, and what the products called "art" really mean.

In her extraordinary career as a prison reformer, Miriam Van Waters worked tirelessly to champion the cause of socially disadvantaged and delinquent women. Yet, it was her sensational battle to retain the superintendency of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in 1949 that made her a national cause celebre, triumphantly defending herself against an array of political and ideological enemies. In this compelling biography, Estelle Freedman moves beyond the controversy to reveal a remarkable woman whose success rested upon the power of her own charismatic leadership. She touched thousands of people - from Boston Brahmins to alcoholics, prostitutes, and desperate criminals, to her devoted prison staff and volunteers. Through her, we meet a wealth of characters, including Eleanor Roosevelt, and see the realities of life in the early decades of this century for a single mother of an adopted daughter. A compelling tale in its own right, Van Waters life also supplies a missing chapter in the history of American women. Combining a deep faith in the social power of motherhood with professional efforts to secure equal justice for women and children. Van Waters and her generation provide a legacy for contemporary woman activists.

The quest to understand the self has a long and illustrious history, from pre-Socratic philosophy to current research in developmental psychology. The Self in Transition presents the most recent research on the self during the pivotal period of transition from infancy to early childhood.

A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Ivo Andric's novel. A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, 'The Bridge on the Drina' earned Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.