Robert Frew Ltd. Archives - Rare Book Insider

Robert Frew Ltd.

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book (2)

The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

FIRST EDITION. Folio (30.5 x 24 cm). pp.296. Original turquoise cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pale-yellow endpapers, pictorial dust-jacket. The faintest of wear to dust-jacket, generally an excellent copy. Profusely illustrated in colour and monochrome throughout. The word Bloomsbury most often summons the novels of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster or images of artists and intellectuals debating the hot parlor topics of 1910s and 1920s London: literary aesthetics, agnosticism, defining truth and goodness, and the ideas of Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead, and G. E. Moore. But the Bloomsbury Group also played a prominent role in the development of modernist painting in Britain. The work of artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and their colleagues was often audacious and experimental, and proved to be one of the key influences on twentieth-century British art and design. This catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition of the Bloomsbury painters originating at the Tate Gallery in London and travelling to the Yale Center for British Art and the Huntington Art Gallery, provides a new look at the visual side of a movement that is more generally known for its literary production. It traces the artists' development over several decades and assesses their contribution to modernism. Catalogue entries on two hundred works, all illustrated in color, bring out the chief characteristics of Bloomsbury painting--domestic, contemplative, sensuous, and essentially pacific. These are seen in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes set in London, Sussex, and the South of France, as well as in the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. Portraits of family and friends--from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell--highlight the cultural and social setting of the group. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them, exploring friendships and relationships both within and outside of Bloomsbury, as well as the movement's wider social, economic, and political background. With beautiful illustrations and a highly accessible text, this catalogue represents a unique look at this fascinating artistic enclave. In addition to the editor, the contributors are James Beechey and Richard Morphet.
  • $126
Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa.

Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa.

GRIFFITHS, Claire H. FIRST EDITION. 8vo. (23 x 15 cm). pp.xv+323. Original glossy pictorial boards. An excellent copy. Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa is a study of development in the former French colonies of West Africa. It takes as its starting point the international community's reporting on human and social development and gender in the developing areas which began systematically in 1990 and which has provided a framework for policy-making in this field. International reports suggest that the francophone African countries have been experiencing low levels of social development throughout the past two decades. These levels fall dramatically when the factor of gender is introduced to the point where statistically-speaking francophone African women have had less access to social development than any other population in the world. This study analyses current thinking on the challenges facing gender and development in Africa, before moving on to examine the historical factors marking the gender and development profile of the francophone West African region. Through an analysis of gender politics in the region from pre-colonial to postcolonial times, the book examines the gradual incursion of exogenous gender policies into the region throughout the 20th century. The discussion concludes by arguing that despite the tendency of the international community, and their colonial administrative forebears, to pursue 'one-size-fits-all' solutions to what they identified as the main development challenges of the day, the impact of standardized solutions remains subject to the unique historical and cultural context in which they are implemented. Adapting formula-driven policies to unique cultural contexts constitutes a major challenge for gender and development politics in the second decade of the new century. Meanwhile, the book coincides with the introduction of a new international development agenda in Africa articulated around issues of security and globalisation. While civil unrest continues to destabilise vast regions of the continent making the prospects of human and social development ever more remote, the rise of China among the traditional powerbrokers threatens to push social development and gender equality even further down the international agenda for Africa. This book is a timely reminder of the feminisation of poverty and disadvantage in the region and the need to keep the gender dimensions of development at the top of the social policy agenda for Africa in the 21st century.
  • $126
book (2)

Annapolis Pasts: Historical Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland.

FIRST EDITION. 8vo. (23 x 15 cm). pp.xxxiii+371. Original white cloth, spine lettered in black, pictorial dust-jacket. An excellent copy, as new. Extensively illustrated with figures, maps, and tables throughout. The Archaeology in Annapolis project has been one of the most important undertaken by historical archaeologists. Notable for its emphasis on public education and its use of citywide research, it has carried out an innovative analysis of material culture to show how a wide range of social and economic classes residing in Maryland's capital responded over time to a changing world.Annapolis Pasts offers a close look at the trend-setting project. Drawing on more than a decade of study, it provides a cross-section of the substantive and theoretical issues that Archaeology in Annapolis has explored. The volume gathers the work of some of the most innovative authorities in historical archaeology along with that of younger scholars who participated in the project, all of whom demonstrate the cutting-edge approaches that have won it wide respect. And despite differences in theoretical orientations, all the contributors have used Annapolis's archaeological data to interpret the emergence of capitalism as both a dynamic market force and an equally dynamic body of social rules. In studies of sites ranging from eighteenth-century formal gardens to nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American neighborhoods, the book explores the development of modern society as reflected in such examples of material culture as food, printer's type, tableware, and landscape architecture, showing how these features of everyday life were used to reproduce, modify, and resist capitalist society over three centuries. It also investigates subordinated groups in Annapolis -- African Americans, women, the working class -- to provide insight into racism, class structure, and consumer society in the early years of theindustrial revolution.Annapolis Pasts clearly demonstrates that traditional objects of study like Georgian mansions and colonial crafts cannot be understood without considering their complete social and economic milieu. It presents a fascinating mosaic of human activity that shows how archaeologists can interpret the different social, temporal, and theoretical pieces of a city's history, and it provides anthropologists, economists, and historians with an example of the multifaceted effects of capitalism and industrialization in one corner of America.