Explore the vast range of titles available.

Alison Bechdel's award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, has been widely recognized for its literary sophistication. Themes familiar in the memoir genre—the author's intellectual and sexual development and her relationship with her father—are invariably filtered through her adventures in reading. This essay presents the different modes of reading Alison's encounters: reading for identification, reading for parallels and symbolic meanings, reading for the sensual pleasure of language. Bechdel arrives ultimately at her own understanding of reading as an ongoing struggle. Bechdel teaches her readers to be attentive, in particular, to the often-overlooked materiality of reading: the book as object and the page in its spatial layout, language as sensuous sound and rhythm, and the experience of both writers and readers as embodied participants in the process.

From the establishment of tight Soviet control over Central Asia in the 1940s, and toward the beginnings of the nuclear and space ages, orientalist paradigms have been redeployed within art and propaganda production in the USSR. Soviet orientalism remains the untold story manifested by discrepancies between the expanding bibliography on the art of the Soviet Union and its lack of integration within the established field of postcolonial studies and its methodologies. The urgency of such integration is fueled by increasing tensions within the former Soviet Bloc today.

Embedded in a historical memory spanning centuries and cultures, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers entered a new era in the nineteenth century. Straddling two worlds—the pragmatic and aesthetic—the rivers were still celebrated for their physical prowess based on long-standing roles as transportation arteries, unifiers, nurturers, and oppressors. Juxtaposed with the pragmatic and utilitarian needs the rivers served, the aesthetic properties of each river grew more pronounced throughout the century. Already iconic presences in the United States and Russia through folklore and mythology, the Volga and Mississippi Rivers evolved into nationalist symbols by the mid nineteenth century as the

Using sociolinguistic theories of \"prosaics\" and the \"dialogic,\" this essay explores the rhetoric which characterizes Dutch still-life painting and the personal essay. Both employ such features as rotation, series, arc, and gestures of intimacy to create a coherent, angular form which conjoins speaker and listener in vigorous yet tentative explorations of ordinary life.

The career of the Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov suggests the particular way in which Russian modernism was affected both by the unusually literary nature of the dominant pre-modern tendencies in Russian art and also by religio-political preoccupations, which were stronger in Russia than elsewhere in Europe. His experience also gives a fascinating example of how even a painter deeply hostile to the Russian Revolution of 1917 could regroup and continue his career.

Russian artists of the early and mid-nineteenth century set out on voyages of discovery: of their country’s interior landscape; of theintérieuror domestic dwelling space of diverse social classes; of the “inner city” beyond the majestic squares of the capitals; and sometimes even of their own internal selves and those of their artistic subjects. The term “discovery” might well be replaced by “revelation” or “reinvention,” since some artists were driven by various motives; and since they idealized what they “discovered” as did their predecessors, though in a new way.¹ No dramatic break with academia can explain the outward journey

Even the most assiduous art historians do not trace the roots of the Russian avant-garde movement further back than the middle of the nineteenth century. Some think even that too far. The first paintings which can be reasonably assigned to it did not appear until 1910. By 1925 the movement was moribund; by 1935 in Russia, it was dead. There were still practitioners working abroad, and the influence of the movement was even then world wide. But as a Russian phenomenon, the avant-garde was gone. In those years, at most no more than a lifetime, fewer than fifty Russian artists

Kristof reviews \"Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century\" by Rosalind P. Gray.