(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)
(0)Sander L. Gilman
Author
Description
"Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to...
Author
Description
How have the insane appeared in the eyes of the rest of society throughout history? And how has that changing image of the insane affected the way they have been identified or diagnosed, cared for or persecuted, confined or treated? "Seeing the Insane" is a monumental work tormenting in scholarly text and 287 remarkable illustrations the gradual evolution of the image of the insane from the Middle Ages onward. It is a richly detailed cultural history...
Author
Description
"Jurek Becker, the author of the first comic novel on the Holocaust, Jacob the Liar, and other highly acclaimed works, was one of West Germany's most famous exiles from the GDR. A survivor of the Shoah - his mother died in a Nazi death camp - and witness to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Becker endured most of the trials that Jews experienced in Europe from the onset of World War II to the end of the Cold War."
"In the first biography of...
Author
Description
"He is the epitome of health - or a walking time bomb. He is oversexed - or sexless. He is jolly - or hiding the tears of a clown. He is the picture of wealth and plenty - or the bloated, malnourished emblem of poverty. He is the fat man - a cultural icon, social enigma, a pressing medical issue - and he is the subject of this book." "The figures that Sander L. Gilman considers, from the ugly fat man with the beautiful sylph trapped inside to the...
Author
Description
An examination of Jewish self-hatred viewed as the adoption and internalization of antisemitic stereotypes. Focuses on the belief in the existence of a secret Jewish language and the accusation that Jews are incapable of truly mastering the language and discourse of the society in which they live, tracing the response of Jewish writers in Germany to this accusation from the early modern period up to the Holocaust. Discusses the treatment of Jewish...
Author
Description
"This book looks at the interweaving of fact and fiction relating to obesity, tracing public concern from the mid-nineteenth century to the modern day. It looks critically at the source of our anxieties, covering issues such as childhood obesity, the production of food, media coverage of the subject, and the emergence of obesity in modern China. Written as a cultural history, the book is particularly concerned with the cultural meanings that have...
Author
Description
A Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the "serious" medical literature of the fin de siècle, which described Jews as inherently pathological and sexually degenerate. In this book, Sander L. Gilman argues that Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis. Examining a variety of scientific writings, Gilman discusses the prevailing belief that...
Description
Smoke: A Global History of Smoking examines the culture of smoking in different traditions and locations around the world. From opium dens in Victorian England to tobacco in Edo period Japan, and from ganja and cocaine to Havana cigars, Smoke encompasses the subject as no book has before. Based in cultural history, it employs a large number of images as part of its evidence: around 300 illustrations document smoking and smokers of many substances...
Author
Description
Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray,...