sissi's world offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the habsburg empress elisabeth of austria. it investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in european cultural history.

sissi's world explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving austrian empress, and the queen of hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.

despite the continuing fascination with "the beloved sissi," the habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. this collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media.

in the centennial cure, the second volume in the studies in atlantic canada history series, meaghan elizabeth beaton critically examines the intersection of state policy, cultural development, and commemoration in nova scotia during canada's centennial celebrations.

beaton's engaging and insightful analysis of four case studies-- the establishment of the cape breton miners' museum, the construction of halifax's centennial swimming pool, the community improvement program, and the 1967 nova scotia highland games and folk festival--reveals the province's attempts to reimagine and renew public spaces. through these case studies beaton illuminates the myriad ways in which nova scotians saw themselves, in the context of modernity and ethnic identity, during the post-war years. the successes and failures of these infrastructure and cultural projects, intended to foster and develop cultural capital, reflected the socio-economic realities and dreams of local communities. the centennial cure shifts our focus away from the dominant studies on expo'67 to provide a nuanced and tension filled account of how canada's 1967 centennial celebrations were experienced in other parts of canada.

telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. but for the first chronicle in the japanese vernacular, a tale of flowering fortunes (eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. the health of the community was at stake. flowering tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late heian society, a golden age of court literature in women's hands. takeshi watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by the tale of genji, inspired eiga's new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace.

tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, watanabe shows how eiga's female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of the tale of genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. these reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers' journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. flowering tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.

the battle of leyte gulf was the greatest naval engagement in history. the battle was four separate actions, none of which were fought in the gulf itself, and the result was the destruction of japanese naval power in the pacific. this book is a detailed and comprehensive account of the fighting from both sides. it provides the context of the battle, most obviously in terms of japanese calculations and the search for "a fitting place to die" and "the chance to bloom as flowers of death." using japanese material never previously noted in western accounts, h. p. willmott provides new perspectives on the unfolding of the battle and very deliberately seeks to give readers a proper understanding of the importance of this battle for american naval operations in the following month. this careful interrogation of the accounts of "the last fleet action" is a significant contribution to military history.

the material and intellectual presence of egypt is at the heart of western culture, religion and art from antiquity to the present. this volume aims to provide a long term and interdisciplinary perspective on egypt and its mnemohistory, taking theories on objects and their agency as its main point of departure. the central questions the book addresses are why, from the first millennium bc onwards, things and concepts egyptian are to be found in such a great variety of places throughout european history and how we can account for their enduring impact over time. by taking a radically object-oriented perspective on this question, this book is also a major contribution to current debates on the agency of artefacts across archaeology, anthropology and art history.