Books by "Bruce A. Francis"
5 books found
This is a retelling in prose of Dante's "Paradise," the third part of his "Divine Comedy."
This is a retelling in prose of Dante's "Divine Comedy." It includes his Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. In the "Divine Comedy," Dante journeys through the three parts of the afterlife.
William Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, aka Henry IV, Part 1: A Retelling in Prose
by David Bruce
2014 · Lulu.com
What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national--and in some cases royalist--loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England's church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.
The Stereoscopic Picturesque is an interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century 3D photography and its relation to the picturesque tradition in art, literature, and tourism. The study focuses on the invention of the stereoscope, originally a laboratory device for demonstrating the nature of three-dimensional vision, and the simultaneous invention of photography, in order to show how early stereo photographers used the optics of the stereoscope to extend the possibilities of picturesque representation. Their images also made “virtual travel” possible for an international mass audience, allowing millions of people to explore places and natural wonders that they would otherwise never have seen. Many of these places had deep literary associations – Wordsworth’s Lake District, for instance, or Scott’s Trossachs – and the stereography of these regions constitutes an important, yet largely unexplored, chapter in the reception history of these authors. Many of the photographs were deliberate attempts to encourage the preservation of environmentally sensitive sites, something the realism of photography and the 3D presentation of the stereoscope made especially effective. The Stereoscopic Picturesque combines fields of study that have rarely been brought into such close contiguity: the history of science, art history, the history of photography, literature, and environmentalism. The result is an unprecedented look at Victorian popular culture and the way stereo photography shaped their ways of seeing the world.