Susan Owens

The Ghost' delves into a wealth of literary and artistic sources, including illuminated manuscripts, woodcut engravings, magic-lantern slides, paintings, prints, poems, novels and stories ? providing a fresh take on a subject that has fascinated us for centuries0In this broad cultural history, Susan Owens reveals what these spirits and apparitions can tell us about our culture and about ourselves, and explores how ghosts have inhabited a wide range of roles from medieval times to the present day.0A dazzling range of artists are featured, including William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Paul Nash and Jeremy Deller, alongside writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters.

A Cultural History

The Ghost

David Attenborough

Martin Clayton

Rea Alexandratos

Describes the methods by which selected European artists, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Mark Catesby, portrayed the natural world during the Age of Discovery.

The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery

Amazing Rare Things

Artists, Writers, & the British Landscape

Spirit of Place

High school is not easy, and don't Sarah know it. After moving back to her father's home town, Sarah finds that things are not as they seem. What do a centuries old curse and a silly ring have in common? Sarah soon will find out.

Howlsville

A Farce in Two Acts

Hook, Line and Sink Her

Ha, Ha, Hilarious

Lyrical and compelling, Spirit of Place examines the British landscape as it’s portrayed in literature and art. English landscape painting is often said to be an eighteenth-century invention, yet when we look for representations of the countryside in British art and literature, we find a story that begins with Old English poetry and winds its way through history, all the way up to the present day. In Spirit of Place, Susan Owens illuminates how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined, and reshaped by generations of creative thinkers. To offer a panoramic view of the countryside throughout history, Owens dives into the work of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain Poet to Thomas Gainsborough, Jane Austen, J. M. W. Turner, and John Constable, and from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Robert Macfarlane. Richly illustrated, including manuscript pages, early maps, paintings, film stills, and photographs, Spirit of Place is a compelling narrative of how we have been shown the British landscape.

Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers & The British Landscape

Nicholas Tromans

The first art book to explore Rossetti's art and poetry together, including her own artworks, illustrations to her writing, and art inspired by her Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is among the greatest of English Victorian poets. The intensity of her vision, her colloquial style, and the lyrical quality of her verse still speak powerfully to us today, while her striking imagery has always inspired artists. Rossetti lived in an exceptionally visual environment: her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the leading member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and she became a favorite model for the group. She sat for the face of Christ in William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World, while both John Everett Millais and Frederick Sandys illustrated her poetry. Later on, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the great Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff were inspired by Rossetti's enigmatic verses. This engaging book explores the full artistic context of Rossetti's life and poetry: her own complicated attitude to pictures; the many portraits of her by artists, including her brother, John Brett, and Lewis Carroll; her own intriguing and virtually unknown drawings; and the wealth of visual images inspired by her words.

Poetry in Art

Christina Rossetti

Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise examines the evolving role of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and it's influence on British environmental policy from its inception in 1970 to its closure in 2011.Drawing upon an extensive range of sources, this book provides the only full account of this influential body, and is a fascinating analysis of expertise and policy formation. Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise provides a wider contribution to insights on expertise and advisory practices, offering a rich and detailed account of authority, autonomy, and trust, of the diverse roles that advisors can play, and draws important lessonsabout the nature of constructive interaction. Above all, it demonstrates the complexity and contingency of these interactions, contributing substantially to a theory of expertise, and drawing out important implications for the future of 'good advice'.

The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

Knowledge, Policy, and Expertise

When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these changes reflected in and affected by art and literature? English landscape painting is often said to be an 18th-century invention. But when we look for representations of the countryside in British art and literature, we find a story that begins with Old English poetry and treads a winding path up to the present day. Spirit of Place offers a panoramic view of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, Turner and Constable; from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Robert Macfarlane. Guided by these distinctive voices and imagery, and with a sharp eye for an anecdote, Susan Owens elucidates how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by generations. Each account, whether limned in a psalter, jotted down in a journal or constructed from sticks and stones, holds up a mirror to its maker and their world.

Susan Owens

About

Books

Join the club