Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) was a French Symbolist poet, theorist, and teacher whose ideas and legendary salons set the stage for twentieth-century experimentation in poetry, music, theater and art. A canonical figure in the legacy of modernism, Mallarmé was also a lifelong champion of the book as both a literary endeavor and a carefully crafted material object.

In The Book as Instrument, Anna Sigrídur Arnar explores how this object functioned for Mallarmé and his artistic circle, arguing that the book became a strategic site for encouraging a modern public to actively partake in the creative act, an idea that informed later 20th-century developments such as conceptual and performance art. Arnar demonstrates that Mallarmé was invested in creating radically empowering reading experiences, and the diverse modalities he proposed for both reading and looking anticipate interactive media prevalent in today's culture. In describing the world of books, visual culture, and mass media of the late nineteenth century, Arnar touches upon an array of themes that continues to preoccupy us in our own moment, including speculations on the future of the book. Enhanced by gorgeous illustrations, The Book as Instrument is sure to fascinate anyone interested in the ever-vibrant experiment between word and image that makes the page and the multisensory pleasures of reading.

Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.

Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists--including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers--to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policy makers, and artists alike.

"At a moment when culture's digital makeover seems to have induced epistemological vertigo in many, Switching Codes offers a timely and well-targeted intervention. ... Bartscherer, Coover, and their authors take up the challenges posed by the digital arts and humanities, mapping their new contexts, defining their analytic repertoire, and compelling a fresh set of insights. More than a portrait of our times, Switching Codes exemplifies the very logics that it explicates."--William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A study of the American culture of reform in the Progressive Era, the book follows the career of John Cotton Dana, famous first as a librarian, then as an iconoclastic museum director. The museum he created in Newark, New Jersey, was to be an alternative to conventional art museums like the ones in Boston, New York, and Chicago.

Blackbear Bosin's civic sculpture towers above the Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. The civic monument, held in high regard by Indians and citizens at large is on a historic site where two branches of the "River of Arrows" (Arkansas River) intersect, near the Mid-America All Indian Center where powwows and ceremonies are held.

The book is about the building of the monument and Blackbear's intent to "put the Indians back on the plains." The text briefly explains events of post-Civil War Kansas and the founding of Wichita in 1870--events connected to the enforced expulsion of Indians from Kansas to Oklahoma Territory--and is the most extensive biographical sketch of this important American Indian artist thus far.

This catalog explores the structure of the Maya cosmos, the harmonious and orderly universe, through images on artifacts, mostly from the Classic period. Maya civilization began to develop in southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and western El Salvador around 2000 B.C.

During the Preclassic period (2000 B.C.-A.D. 250) defining traits of the civilization appeared: governance by royalty and nobles, cities centered on temple-pyramids and plazas, a pantheon of gods requiring sacrifice, a ritual ballgame, hieroglyphic writing, mathematics with the concept of zero, and an accurate calendar. These characteristics reached their fullest expression during the Classic period (A.D. 250-900). Cities in the northern Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemalan highlands dominated the Postclassic period (A.D. 900-1524) and expressed Classic traits in modified form until the Spanish and their native allies invaded in the early 1520s. Maya culture today is a hybrid of indigenous and European traits.

This volume is published in conjunction with the exhibition Art of Sky, Art of Earth: Maya Cosmic Imagery at the Museum of Anthropology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Can one be happy and free, and nonetheless be moral? This question occurs at the core of daily life and is, as well, a question as old as philosophy itself. In Can Virtue Make Us Happy? The Art of Living and Morality, Otfried Höffe, one of Europe's most well-known philosophers, offers a far-reaching and foundational work in philosophical ethics. As long as one understands "happiness" purely as a feeling of subjective well-being, Höffe argues, there is at best only an accidental unity between it and morality. However, if one means by "happiness" the quality of doing well in the sense of one's own successful existence, then one must include actions that undoubtedly have a moral character and are named virtues. He uses clear and general language to present what one understands by "happiness" and "freedom" while illuminating the blind alleys in the history of philosophy as well as the difficulties raised by the issues themselves. What has priority: good ends or right action? Is freedom always anarchy? Is it possible to think of a freedom enhanced by morality? Is "morality" only a pretty word for stupidity? Does humanity have a good or a bad character? Is there such a thing as evil? Höffe offers us enlightened philosophical reflection and foundational orientation but no simple formulas; this is precisely what is at stake because anyone who wishes to live a self-determined life rejects any and all formulas.

The illustrations of the Benedictine monk, artist, and chronicler Matthew Paris offer a gateway into the 13th-century world. This new study of his cartography emphasizes the striking innovations he brought to it and shows how the maps became an investment and repository of certain medieval spatial practices: travel through the world, the occurrence of history in that world, and the religious practices and devotional attitudes that were assiduously cultivated within the larger visual culture of St. Albans abbey (in great measure produced by Matthew's own images). Travel (i.e. space), history (time), and devotion (liturgy), then, are the primary issues and meanings deposited in and registered by Matthew Paris's cartographic landscape. In searching out these contexts, the book explores the paradigm of imagined pilgrimage as an organizing principle that pushes into greater relief medieval understandings of their arrangements of places and of histories. Thus traveling through geography could enact its meanings in a dynamic, religious, even devotional performance of the maps' materials. Richly illustrated with black and white and color plates.

Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the 19th-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and by the sculptor herself. Buick argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis's sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis's intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis's fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct "American" national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis's career--including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy--and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis's most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha," Forever Free, and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians' assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Illuminating one thousand years of history, The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the 14th century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq. Spanish galleons delivered porcelain to Peru and Mexico while aristocrats in Europe ordered tableware from Canton. The book tells the fascinating story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances--from Japan and Java to Egypt and England. It not only illustrates how porcelain influenced local artistic traditions but also shows how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics, and social identity. Bringing together many strands of history in an engaging narrative studded with fascinating vignettes, this is a history of cross-cultural exchange focused on an exceptional commodity that illuminates the emergence of what is arguably the first genuinely global culture.

Property Outlaws puts forth the intriguingly counterintuitive proposition that, in the case of both tangible and intellectual-property law, disobedience can often lead to an improvement in legal regulation. The authors argue that in property law, there is a tension between the competing demands of stability and dynamism, but its tendency is to become static and fall out of step with the needs of society.

The authors employ wide-ranging examples of the behaviors of "property outlaws"--the trespasser, squatter, pirate, or file-sharer--to show how specific behaviors have induced legal innovation. They also delineate the similarities between the actions of property outlaws in the spheres of tangible and intellectual property. An important conclusion of the book is that a dynamic between the activities of "property outlaws" and legal innovation should be cultivated in order to maintain this avenue of legal reform.