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From the early days of steamship travel, artists stifled by the culture of their homelands fled to islands, jungles, and deserts in search of new creative and emotional frontiers. Their flight inspired a unique body of work that doesn't fit squarely within the Western canon, yet may be some of the most original statements we have about the range and depth of the artistic imagination. Focusing on six principal subjects, Jamie James locates "a lost national school" of artists who left their homes for the unknown. There is Walter Spies, the devastatingly handsome German painter who remade his life in Bali; Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who found fame in Europe; Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara dressed as an Arab man; the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and became a committed follower of voodoo. From France, Paul Gauguin left for Tahiti; and Victor Segalen, a naval doctor, poet, and novelist, immersed himself in classical Chinese civilization in imperial Peking. In The Glamour of Strangeness, James evokes these extraordinary lives in portraits that bring the transcultural artist into sharp relief. Drawing on his own career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating study of the powerful connection between art and the exotic.

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Myths reflect, reinforce, and sometimes subvert gender ideologies and so have an influence in the 'real world'. This is true in the present no less than when the Greek and Roman myths were created. The struggles to redefine gender roles and identities in our own time are inevitably reflected in our interpretations and retellings of these classical myths. Using the new lenses provided by gender studies and diverse forms of feminism, Lillian Doherty re-examines some of the major approaches to myth interpretation in the twentieth century: psychological, ritualist, 'charter', structuralist and folklorist. She also explores 'popular' uses of classical mythology - from television and comic books to the evocation of goddesses in Jungian psychology.

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Oprah Winfrey is an unprecedented and important cultural phenomenon. This book aims to understand the reasons for her spectacular success and visibility. Based on nearly one hundred show transcripts; a year and a half of watching the show regularly; and analysis of magazine articles, several biographies, O Magazine, Oprah Book Club novels, self-help manuals promoted on the show, and hundreds of messages on the Oprah Winfrey Web site, it takes the Oprah industry seriously in order to ask fundamental questions about how culture works today.

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From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt. Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

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Published in conjunction with "Between worlds: Raden Saleh and Juan Luna", an exhibition organised by National Gallery Singapore.