a stunningly illustrated look at how blake's radical vision influenced artists of the beat generation and 1960s counterculture

in his own lifetime, william blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. william blake and the age of aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the american counterculture.

this book provides new insights into the politics and protests of blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the "long sixties." contributors explore blake's outsider status in georgian england and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the beat generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to blake were such diverse figures as diane arbus, jay defeo, the doors, sam francis, allen ginsberg, jess, agnes martin, ad reinhardt, charles seliger, maurice sendak, robert smithson, clyfford still, and many others. this book also explores visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as woodstock and the summer of love.

william blake and the age of aquarius shows how blake's myths, visions, and radicalism found new life among american artists who valued individualism and creativity, explored expanded consciousness, and celebrated youth, peace, and the power of love in a turbulent age.

exhibition schedule:
mary and leigh block museum of art, northwestern university
september 23, 2017-march 11, 2018

in the nineteenth century, the french lyric poets imposed their diction on the theatrical genre and thus illuminated the essence of both poetry and theatre. ten plays by victor hugo, the standard-bearer of the french romantic theatre, and alfred de musset, the romantic playwright most frequently performed in france today, are analyzed by charles affron to answer the question, "can the dialetic form of the theatre accommodate the solitary elan of the lyric poet?"

as a functional point of departure, he considers those characteristics of lyric poetry--time, voice, and metaphor--which bring us closest to the singular attitudes of hugo and musset. then, examining the texts of hernani, les burgraves, torquemada, fantasio, and lorenzaccio as well as several lesser known plays, mr. affron discusses such topics as poetic time, the scope of analogy, theatrical and poetic rhetoric, the guises of the poet-hero, and the manner of sounding the poet's voice upon the stage.

originally published in 1971.

the princeton legacy library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of princeton university press. these editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. the goal of the princeton legacy library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by princeton university press since its founding in 1905.

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.

ten arab filmmakers provides an up-to-date overview of the best of arab cinema, offering studies of leading directors and in-depth analyses of their most important films. the filmmakers profiled here represent principal national cinemas of the arab world--algeria, egypt, lebanon, morocco, palestine, and syria. although they have produced many of the region's most-renowned films and gained recognition at major international festivals, with few exceptions these filmmakers have received little critical attention. all ten share a concern with giving image and voice to people struggling against authoritarian regimes, patriarchal traditions, or religious fundamentalism--theirs is a cin ma engag .

the featured directors are daoud abd el-sayed, merzak allouache, nabil ayouch, youssef chahine, mohamed chouikh, michel khleifi, nabil maleh, yousry nasrallah, jocelyne saab, and elia suleiman.