Prompted by recent challenges to and debates about the relative public silence concerning the effects of the Allied air war over Europe during World War II, this collection of essays examines literary, visual (film and photography), and institutional (museums) representations of the bombing of civilian targets, predominantly in Germany.
Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate - all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of 'aesthetic illusion', as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts.
The question "e;how has ancient India's incredibly rich literary heritage been visually represented"e; forms the centerpiece of this latest volume in Brill's series Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology.
Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting.
