Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression (Comedia)

Jo Spence was one of Britain's pioneering photographers. Born into a working-class London family, she worked for many years as a studio photographer. Her political concerns led to documentary photography. Soon after completing her degree in the theory and practice of photography, she discovered she had breast cancer. Through her struggle to come to terms with the illness, to find non-invasive treatments and to share her experience with others, she developed unique ways of using photography.

Cultural Sniping brings together a wide range of Jo Spence's photographs and writings for the first time. Through images and texts she explores complex issues of gender, class, health and the body, and their impact on her understanding of personal history and the construction of identity.

Cultural Sniping includes images from Spence's early work in documentary photography and from her pioneering photo-therapy projects, undertaken in collaboration with other photographers. In her later work Spence faces up to the experience of illness and dying, and Cultural Sniping reproduces work from her Return to Nature and Death Mask series, in which she tries to come to terms with the reality of death. Jo Spence's commitment to engaging with personal experience, political understanding and critical theory make her writing and photography a vital contribution to our understanding of the politics of representation.

Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression (Comedia)

The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Seduced the West

The fascinating story of a geisha who captivated the West

The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation

The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.
In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature through medieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexual betrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity.
These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundary between the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infinite regress of self-discovery.
Drawing on a dizzying array of tales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.

The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-Imitation

Paperback

13 Women Artists Children Should Know

Highlighting five hundred years of great art by women, this book introduces readers to amazing painters, sculptors, and photographers.

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

This chronicles the interrelation of gender, class and race which shaped British imperialism and, subsequently, its bloody dismantling.

Beatrix Potter's Journal

Beatrix Potter kept a secret diary written in code. When the code was cracked by Leslie Linder more than 20 years after her death, the diary revealed a remarkable picture of upper middle-class life in late Victorian Britain. This book includes excerpts, which provide an insight into her personality.

Beatrix Potter's Journal

Between the ages of 15 and 30 Beatrix Potter kept a secret diary written in code. When the code was cracked by Leslie Linder more than 20 years after her death, the diary revealed a remarkable picture of upper middle-class life in late Victorian Britain. The original diaries run to over 200,000 words so for this edition Glen Cavaliero has made a careful selection of complete entries and excerpts which provide an illuminating insight into the personality and inspiration of one of the world's best loved children's authors.

Beatrix Potter A Journal

Describes Beatrix Potter's life as a young woman in Victorian Britain as she struggled to achieve independence and to find artistic success and romantic love. Using commentary taken from Beatrix' s own diaries, this journal features paintings, photographs, letters and period memorabilia to recreate a world combining nature and imagination.

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern

Flapper

Paperback book

Restless Lives: The Bohemian World of Rodrigo and Elinor Moynihan

RESTLESS lives is a portrait of the eventful, often stormy marriage of two distinguished painters as observed by their only son. Rodrigo Moynihan and Elinor Bellingham Smith met at the Slade and married in 1931, and John was born in the following summer. John Moynihan records, as through a child's eyes, their early life in the London art world of the 1930s. Their close friends included the three founders of the Euston Road School, William Coldstream, Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore, Coldstream's wife Nancy Sharp and Geoffrey Tibble, Rodrigo's fellow pioneer of 'Objective Abstraction'.

In 1943, Rodrigo was appointed an Official War Artist and soon displayed his portraiture gifts with his famous Private Clarke A.TS, which hangs in Tate Britain and his eloquent depiction of wartime indignities in The Medical Inspection.

After the war, and the family's move to Chelsea, John noted signs of cracks in his parents' marriage. Both were now successful artists, Elinor showing regularly at the Leicester Galleries and winning second prize in the Festival of Britain Exhibition in 1951, and Rodrigo being elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and commissioned to paint his noted portraits of Princess Elizabeth and Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

...the pair's home at 155 Old Church Street became an artists' and writers' salon, frequented by luminaries such as Francis Bacon, Johnny Minton, Henry Lamb, David Sylvester, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor and Lucian Freud.

Dominating all other personalities in this early 1950s milieu was the increasingly manic John Minton, with whom Elinor had developed a close friendship as her marriage to Rodrigo began to fall apart, but this in turn became strained as Minton drank more and more heavily. The Moynihans' marriage finally broke up in 1957, and the story concludes with Minton's suicide, Rodrigo moving to the South of France to live with Anne Dunn, whom he would later marry, and Elinor settling in Boxford, Suffolk.

Women's Work: The First 20, 000 Years - Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times

Women's Work: The First 20, 000 Years - Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times