This book begins with the understanding that, in addition to their aesthetic qualities, Asian art and material artifacts are expressive of cultural realities and constitute a “visible language” with messages that can be read, interpreted, and analyzed. Asian art and artifacts are understood in their contexts, as “windows” into cultures, and as such can be used as powerful pedagogical tools in many academic disciplines.
The book includes essays by scholars of Asian art, philosophy, anthropology, and religion that focus on objects held in ASIANetwork schools. The ASIANetwork collections are reflective of Asian societies, historical and religious environments, political positions, and economic conditions. The art objects and artifacts were occasionally discovered in storage and were sometimes poorly understood and variously described as fine art, curiosities, souvenirs, and markers of events in a school’s history. The chapter authors tell the stories of the collections, and the collections themselves tell stories of the collectors.
This volume is intended for use in many disciplines, and its interpretive structures are adaptable to other examples of art and artifacts in other colleges, universities, and museums. An online database of some 2,000 art objects held in the ASIANetwork schools’ collections supplements this book.
"The Wife of Bath in Afterlife is a must-read not only for all serious-minded Chaucerian scholars but also for avid readers who earnestly endeavor to enhance their knowledge about theWife of Bath and to broaden their capacity for learning.”
-- Christina Pinkston, Norfolk State University
Review of Fiddled out of Reason, by John William Knapp
"a valuable contribution to our understanding of the hymn as a literary and cultural phenomenon."
-- Joshua Swidzinski, University of Portland
The Final Days of Edgar Allan Poe, by David F. Gaylin, has been "recommended for all readers" by Choice Reviews and was listed in their Community College Top 75 titles.
"This engaging collection redresses the balance of Poe studies to consider his work from the perspective of women, those in his works and those reading them. . . . [It] offers a welcome emphasis on the irrepressibility of women in his work who ‘die but do not stay dead’"
Very much in the spirit of Robertson's many impacts on our field, this collection opens a range of fascinating apertures into the medieval literary world that promise to be useful, both to fellow scholars and in a variety of literature classrooms.
New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature not only makes a fitting tribute to a beloved scholar and teacher; it constitutes a significant contribution to the field in its own right. The essays in this beautifully presented book will be essential reading for anyone interested in late-medieval vernacular theology and its reception, both in England and beyond.
--Nicholas Watson, professor of English, Harvard University
Dolan and Labbe’s wide-ranging yet cohesive collection of essays offers a comprehensive and convincing breadth that succeeds in its mission of placing Charlotte Smith. Beyond Smithian scholarship, the volume comes at a prescient time.
--Heather Heckman-McKenna University of Missouri-Columbia
