Product Description: This book brings together studies of cultural institutions in Manchester from 1850 to the present day, giving an unprecedented account of the city's cultural evolution. These bring to light the remarkable range of Manchester's contribution to modern cultural life, including the role of art education, popular theatre, religion, pleasure gardens, clubs and societies...read more

Product Description: Feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, among other critical approaches, have undermined traditional notions of aesthetics in recent decades. But questions of aesthetic judgment and pleasure persist, and many critics now seek a "return to aesthetics" or a "return to beauty...read more

Product Description: Writing otherwise is a collection of essays by established feminist and cultural critics interested in experimenting with new styles of expression. Leading figures in their field, such as Marianne Hirsch, Lynne Pearce, Griselda Pollock, Carol Smart, Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, all risk new ways of writing about themselves and their subjects...read more

Product Description: Early twentieth-century art and art practice in Britain and the United States were, Janet Wolff asserts, marginalized by critics and historians in very similar ways after the rise of post-Cubist modern art. In a masterly book on the sociology of modernism, Wolff explores work that was primarily realist and figurative and investigates the social, institutional, political, and aesthetic processes by which that art fell by the wayside in the postwar period...read more

Product Description: In this fascinating book of critical writings, Janet Wolff examines issues of exile, memoir, and movement from the perspective of the female stranger.

A valuable introduction to the central issues in the sociology of the arts, this work draws on sociology, art history, feminism, and literary and media studies, to explain the social nature of the arts, their production, distribution, and reception. This second edition is the result of the author's chapter-by-chapter review and updating, taking into account not only her own re-thinking on these issues but also the work that has been done in cultural studies and the sociology of the arts since the first edition appeared in 1984. Wolff considers changes in sociology, literary studies, and cultural studies, and their implications for the project of the sociology of art: the relevance of post structuralist theory for an understanding of the author/artist; and the current, and perhaps unfounded, rejection of the concept of ideology. The author also assesses the question of cultural politics in relation to debates about postmodernism, as well as the matter of identity politics with regard to gender and ethnicity. Containing a wealth of information about both past and present thinking on the sociology of art, this book will be of particular interest both to students of the arts and students of sociology.

Product Description: Explores sociocultural influences on the construction of traditional aesthetic theories and judgments

Product Description: Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry...read more

Examines the far-reaching economic implications of America's aging population--a group that by 2020 will control seventy percent of the nation's net worth--in terms of lifestyle, buying trends, politics, and society