For over a century, the idea of primitivism has motivated artistic modernism. Focusing on the three decades after World War II, known in France as "les trentes glorieuses" despite the loss of most of the country's colonial empire, this probing and ex...

A nation's standards of private cleanliness reveal much about its ideals of civilization, fears of disease, and expectations for public life, says Kathleen Brown in this unusual cultural history. Starting with the shake-up of European practices that...

In recent decades, many Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have settled in Germany and Israel. In "Food for Thought", Julia Bernstein conducts a widely interdisciplinary investigation into the ways in which such immigrant...

In this volume of sixteen essays, D. R. Nagaraj, the foremost non-Brahmin intellectual to emerge from India's non-English-speaking world, presents his vision of the Indian caste system in relation to Dalit politics – the Dalit being a self-designatio...

Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics – in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs – have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon W...

For sale in CIS only! We all have our image of the French Riviera: the azure blue of the sea and the swimming pools; the dark green of the pines and the swaying palms; the yachts and the sports cars on the Corniche roads; the hovering croupiers raki...

In this lively work, Beatrice K. Otto takes us on a journey around the world in search of one of the most colorful characters in history – the court jester. Though not always clad in cap and bells, these witty, quirky characters crop up everywhere, f...