Visual and Material Culture Subject Guide: Reference Sources

How have objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years? Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. This set brings together over 50 scholars, in 1776 pages, to examine how the world of human subjects shapes and is shaped by the world of material objects. Chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The themes (and chapter titles) are: objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (500 BCE to 500 CE); 2 - Medieval Age (500 to 1400); 3 - Renaissance (1400 to 1600); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1600 to 1760); 5 - Age of Industry (1760 to 1900); 6 - Modern Age (1900 to the present).

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things.

In this broadly interdisciplinary text, Berger takes the reader through half a dozen theoretical models that are commonly used to analyze objects. He then describes and analyzes eleven objects, many of them new to this edition--including smartphones, Facebook, hair dye, and the American flag--showing how they demonstrate concepts like globalization, identity, and nationalism.

This book offers a systematic overview of the diverse ways of studying the material as culture. Surveying the field of material culture studies through an examination and synthesis of classical and contemporary scholarship on objects, commodities, consumption, and symbolization, this book: introduces the key concepts and approaches in the study of objects and their meanings presents the full sweep of core theory - from Marxist and critical approaches to structuralism and semiotics shows how and why people use objects to perform identity, achieve social status, and narrativize life experiences analyzes everyday domains in which objects are important shows why studying material culture is necessary for understanding the social.

The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture spans every art form, medium, and civilization the fall of the Roman Empire, The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture is a comprehensive reference source on this important field of study.

This work replaces Harold Osborne's Oxford Companion to Art (1970), which has been continuously in print for thirty years. Though originally commissioned as a new edition of Osborne's book, it is effectively a completely new work, planned and written afresh for new generations of art lovers. Apart from a handful of classic articles by Harold Osborne mainly on aesthetics, and a few others which needed only minor change, the text is entirely new. Unlike Osborne, it focuses on Western art rather than the whole of world art, concentrating primarily on painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts, leaving architecture to be covered separately.

This best-selling text has guided tens of thousands of art students through the writing process. Students are shown how to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, and are prepared with the tools they need to present their ideas through effective writing.

This index has been compiled as a quick reference guide to biographies of 9,052 professional and amateur artists active in Canada from the seventeenth century to the present, representing 42 professional categories, from animation to topography.

Written by 92 specialists in association with the American Folk Art Museum, the 600 cross-referenced and indexed articles, with bibliographies, included in this selection are the first comprehensive treatment of this influential art form. It includes information on bottle-cap art, canes, carousel art, scrimshaw, quilts, beadwork, and many other genres, as well as information on several visionary artists who still practice their crafts. This work has special appeal for folklorists.