The thrilling adventure of Lady Trent continues in Marie Brennan's The Tropic of Serpents . . . Attentive readers of Lady Trent’s earlier memoir, A Natural History of Dragons, are already familiar with how a bookish and determined young woman named Isabella first set out on the historic course that would one day lead her to becoming the world’s premier dragon naturalist. Now, in this remarkably candid second volume, Lady Trent looks back at the next stage of her illustrious (and occasionally scandalous) career. Three years after her fateful journeys through the forbidding mountains of Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst defies family and convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of such exotic draconian species as the grass-dwelling snakes of the savannah, arboreal tree snakes, and, most elusive of all, the legendary swamp-wyrms of the tropics. The expedition is not an easy one. Accompanied by both an old associate and a runaway heiress, Isabella must brave oppressive heat, merciless fevers, palace intrigues, gossip, and other hazards in order to satisfy her boundless fascination with all things draconian, even if it means venturing deep into the forbidden jungle known as the Green Hell . . . where her courage, resourcefulness, and scientific curiosity will be tested as never before.

Packed with facts, attributions, and entertaining anecdotes about his contemporaries, Giorgio Vasari's collection of biographical accounts also presents a highly influential theory of the development of Renaissance art.Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, who represent the infancy of art, Vasari considers the period of youthful vigour, shaped by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, before discussing the mature period of perfection, dominated by the titanic figures of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo.This specially commissioned translation contains thirty-six of the most important lives as well as an introduction and explanatory notes.About the Series:For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

Winner of the 2014 Western Heritage Award for Nonfiction from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers' accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways , David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation's romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West--one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin's Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton's The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.

McGrady's erudite and exhaustive study is key to understanding Machaut, his works, and his influence on the history of reading in the fourteenth-century and beyond.

THE discourse on "Evolution and Ethics," reprinted in the first half of the present volume, was delivered before the University of Oxford, as the second of the annual lectures founded by Mr. Romanes: whose name I may not write without deploring the untimely death, in the flower of his age, of a friend endeared to me.

The basic political writings of Rousseau , including * Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts * Discourse on the Origin of Inequality * Discourse on Political Economy * On the Social Contract 'The publication of these excellent translations is a happy occasion for teachers of courses in political philosophy and the history of political theory....'--Raymon M. Lemos, Teaching Philosophy 'The single most comprehensive, reliable and economical collection ofRousseaus explicitly political writings.'--Michael Franz, Loyola College

Childe Hassam's impressive career as one of America's foremost Impressionists is celebrated and illuminated in this dazzlingly beautiful volume. No other American Impressionist ever surpassed the quality and variety of Hassam's output as a painter and draftsman. Equally talented in oils, watercolors, and prints, he explored rain-swept city scenes, glorious gardens, exquisite women, and stirring flag-lined streets. Many of these irresistible pictures are hidden in private collections and are rarely, if ever, accessible to the public; others are on view at major museums across the country, from the Metropolitan Museum to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. By approaching Childe Hassam (1859-1935) from different angles, the three authors reveal this multitalented artist's many facets and uncover previously unknown aspects of his life and work. The authoritative essays are illustrated with a brilliant array of color illustrations that represent all of Hassam's styles, from Barbizon-inspired Tonalism to Impressionism to Post-Impressionism. The book concludes with an invaluable illustrated chronology and an annotated bibliography.

A common theme of western American art--from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O'Keeffe--is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this handsome book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies. Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured Indians caught up in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time; when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences--through large edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions--significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region's landscape in the twentieth century. Publication of this book will coincide with an exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opening at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.

Richly illustrated with color plates of paintings from institutional and private collections as well as black-and-white photographs, this reference guide is the only comprehensive volume on early Oregon painters. Listings for over 500 Oregon artists offer biographical details and note where their work was shown and where it is now held. Additional essays on early art museums and art organizations, art galleries and exhibition spaces, and the Federal Art Projects of the 1930s show how the state created itself artistically.

If humans are benevolent by nature, how do societies become corrupt? And how do governments founded upon the defense of individual rights degenerate into tyranny? These are the questions addressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a strikingly original inquiry into much-explored issues of 18th-century (and subsequent) philosophy: human nature and the best form of government. Rousseau takes an innovative approach by introducing a "hypothetical history" that presents a theoretical view of people in a pre-social condition and the ensuing effects of civilization. In his sweeping account of humanity's social and political development, the author develops a theory of human evolution that prefigures Darwinian thought and encompasses aspects of ethics, sociology, and epistemology. He concludes that people are inevitably corrupt as a result of both natural (or physical) inequalities and moral (or political) inequalities. One of the most influential works of the Enlightenment, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality offers a thought-provoking account of society's origins and a keen criticism of unequal modern political institutions.

Following in the tradition of recent work by cultural geographers and historians of maps, this collection examines the apparently familiar figure of Robin Hood as he can be located within spaces that are geographical, cultural, and temporal. The volume is divided into two the first features an interrogation of the literary and other textually transmitted spaces to uncover the critical grounds in which the Robin Hood ’legend’ has traditionally operated. The essays in Part Two take up issues related to performative and experiential space, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between page, stage, and lived experience. Throughout the volume, the contributors contend with, among other things, modern theories of gender, literary detective work, and the ways in which the settings that once advanced court performances now include digital gaming and the enactment of ’real’ lives.