California Press: 1495 books
Waiting for Verdi
Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815-1848
Language: English
Release Date: June 22, 2018
The name Giuseppe Verdi conjures images of Italians singing opera in the streets and bursting into song at political protests or when facing the firing squad. While many of the accompanying stories were exaggerated, or even invented, by later generations, Verdi's operas—along with those by Rossini,...
Wings for Our Courage
Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought
Language: English
Release Date: July 14, 2011
On January 6, 1537, Lorenzino de’ Medici murdered Alessandro de’ Medici, the duke of Florence. This episode is significant in literature and drama, in Florentine history, and in the history of republican thought, because Lorenzino, a classical scholar, fashioned himself after Brutus as a republican...
A Poet's Revolution
The Life of Denise Levertov
Language: English
Release Date: April 17, 2013
This first full-length biography of Anglo- American poet and activist Denise Levertov (1923-1997) brings to life one of the major voices of the second half of the twentieth century, when American poetry was a powerful influence worldwide. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and interviews with...
New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements
Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2015
New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements is the most extensive study to date of modern American alternative spiritual currents. Hugh B. Urban covers a range of emerging religions from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Nation of Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, ISKCON, Wicca,...
by Danielle Fosler-Lussier
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: April 30, 2015
During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world, sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Cultural Presentations program. Performances of music in many styles—classical, rock ’n’ roll, folk, blues, and jazz—competed with those by traveling Soviet and...
Sounds
The Ambient Humanities
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2015
This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing...
Curtain, Gong, Steam
Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera
Language: English
Release Date: May 18, 2018
In this innovative book, Gundula Kreuzer argues for the foundational role of technologies in the conception, production, and study of nineteenth-century opera. She shows how composers increasingly incorporated novel audiovisual effects in their works and how the uses and meanings of the required apparatuses...
The Hum of the World
A Philosophy of Listening
Language: English
Release Date: March 19, 2019
The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas with playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and...
by Christopher Alan Reynolds
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: April 24, 2015
In this original study, Christopher Alan Reynolds examines the influence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on two major nineteenth-century composers, Richard Wagner and Robert Schumann. During 1845–46 the compositional styles of Schumann and Wagner changed in a common direction, toward a style that...
by Joshua Glick
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: January 19, 2018
Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 explores how documentarians working between the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bicentennial created conflicting visions of the recent and more distant American past. Drawing on a wide range of primary documents, Joshua...
by Eric Rath
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2010
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2010
How did one dine with a shogun? Or make solid gold soup, sculpt with a fish, or turn seaweed into a symbol of happiness? In this fresh look at Japanese culinary history, Eric C. Rath delves into the writings of medieval and early modern Japanese chefs to answer these and other provocative questions,...
Before Wilde
Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2013
This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality. Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era—changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world's...
by André Bazin
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2014
André Bazin’s writings on cinema are among the most influential reflections on the medium ever written. Even so, his critical interests ranged widely and encompassed the "new media" of the 1950s, including television, 3D film, Cinerama, and CinemaScope. Fifty-seven of his reviews and...
by Timothy J. Cooley
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2014
This first major examination the interrelationships of music and surfing explores different ways that surfers combine surfing with making and listening to music. Tim Cooley uses his knowledge and experience as a practicing musician and avid surfer to consider the musical practices of surfers in locations...