Books published by Reaktion Books

A new addition to Reaktion's animal series, Parrot is a natural history, as well as a fascinating and innovative account of parrots in culture

This stunning volume is the first comprehensive history of the making and meanings of Russian icons to be released in English. Includes artworks that have never before been published in the Western world.

This classic text has become essential reading for all those working in the field of museum studies.

Addresses the isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life. This title examines a kaleidescope of film fragments drawn from a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy.

Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. Based on contemporary Chinese sources, this illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369-1644) in the social and cultural history of the day.

Presenting a study of Nicolas Poussin, one of seventeenth-century Europe's greatest artists, this title offers a series of connected studies that provide ways of interpreting the work and ideas of Poussin.

Traces and explains the proliferation of paintings of mystical visions during the Counter-Reformation.

From the earliest scratches on stone and bone to the languages of computers and the internet, "e;A History of Writing"e; offers an investigation into the origin and development of writing throughout the world. Commencing with the first stages of information storage knot records, tally sticks, pictographic storytelling the book then focuses on the emergence of complete writing systems in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC, and their diffusion to Egypt, the Indus Valley and points east, with special attention given to Semitic writing systems and their eventual spread to the Indian subcontinent. Also documented is the rise of Phoenician and its effect on the Greek alphabet, generating the many alphabetic scripts of the West. Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems and scripts are dealt with in depth, as is writing in pre-Colombian America. Also explored are Western Europe's medieval manuscripts and the history of printing, leading to the innovations in technology and spelling rules of the 19th and 20th centuries. Illustrated with numerous examples, this book offers a global overview in a form that everyone can follow.The author also reveals his own discoveries made since the early 1980s, making it a useful reference for both students and specialists as well as the general reader.

A wide-ranging reassessment of Renaissance art that examines the ways in which European culture came to define itself culturally and aesthetically in the years 1450 to 1550.

In their diverse expressions, maps and the representational processes of mapping have constructed the spaces of modernity since the early Renaissance. This title explores what mapping has meant in the past and how its meanings have altered.

War has always been close to the centre of British culture, but never more so than in the period since 1850. This text explores the way in which images of battle, both literary and visual, have been constructed in British fiction and popular culture since this time.

Shows how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

From cookbooks and family recipes to novels, poems, songs and cartoons, this book tells the story of puddings and how they developed from early savoury, sausage - like mixtures to today's sweet and sticky confections. It traces the development of puddings and explains how advances in kitchen equipment have changed them over time.

In all his films, Peter Greenaway shows obsessive attention to detail, exaggerating the archaic and fabricating his plots out of an artificial realm of caricature and pastiche. This book examines his vision from a number of perspectives and traces a shift of sensibility in his work.

Focuses on the visual culture of Indian cinema, specifically Bombay-based cinema since 1913. Drawing on a range of sources, this title examines Bombay cinema's unique styles, genres and themes, tracing its roots in early photography, theatre and chromolithography and its development as a visual regime that dominates Indian popular culture.

Rather than being absorbed into a uniform modernity, indigenous people are anticipating alternative futures and appropriating global resources for their own, culturally specific needs. This book argues, controversially, that far from disappearing in the face of global capitalism, indigenous cultures today are as diverse as they ever were.

Examines the nature of boredom, how it originated, its history, how and why it afflicts us, and why we cannot seem to overcome it by any act of will.

Taking the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet in 1959 as its starting point, this book offers an interpretation of the ways in which the idea of Tibet has been imagined by Tibetan artists in exile in India and in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

Although design has become eminently newsworthy among the general public in our society, there is very little understanding to be found of the values and implications that underlie it. This book analyses design's role and status, and discusses what our obsession with it tells us about our own culture.

Will be of interest not only to beekeepers and producers of honey, but also to a wide general audience who appreciate the symbolism, society and cultural meanings of this industrious creature.

An illuminating, often provocative examination of urban images in cinema.

Some of the most significant in modern intellectual and cultural history pass by way of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). This title includes essays by Elisabeth Bronfen, Crosbie Smith, Ludmilla Jordanova, Louis James, Michael Fried, Michael Grant, Jasia Reichardt, Robert Olorenshaw and Jean-Louis Schefer.

Taking the triumph of consumerism as an organizing theme, the author charts the rise and fall of the Conservative Party, developments in British society, culture and politics, environmental issues, questions of identity, and changes in economic circumstance and direction.

Whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on the earth; a large Blue Whale's tongue alone can weigh more than an elephant. This title recounts the evolutionary and ecological background, as well as the cultural history, of these extraordinary mammals, long persecuted and now celebrated throughout the world.

A thoughtful, philosophical and cultural approach to the perennial question of the search for happiness.