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Liz Wells

University Of Plymouth Press

From hen-parties to pub-goers, it was the larger-than-life people of Plymouth that dominated Beryl Cook's colourful paintings and won her thousands of fans across the world. The sea-front city was her beloved home for many years, and it inspired much of her best-known work. Writers and critics Jess Wilder (co-director of Portal Gallery, London), Bernard Samuels (director of Plymouth Arts Centre, 1971-1996, who discovered and was the first to exhibit Cook), Edward Lucie-Smith (international art critic), Bernadette Casey (cultural writer) and Babs Horton (novelist, prize-winning author) offer a unique perspective on the self-taught artist and a critical reassessment of her place within British Art. Illustrations of early and rarely seen work from the Cook family home in Looe, sit alongside some of her instantly recognisable paintings. This book has been produced by the University of Plymouth Press to accompany the first major retrospective of Beryl's work and has a limp case binding with overhang, end papers, sewn section, head and tail bands, 246 x 189 mm full colour match with originals exhibited at the University Peninsula Art Gallery.

Beryl Cook

Arts & Photography

Jess Wilder

Individual Artists

Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit undertakes an analysis of history, culture and the individual in terms of what Noica describes as the fundamental "precariousness" of Being. From the level of inanimate matter to that of the human spirit, Being does not reside inertly in the logical categories of universal/general/particular/individual and determinations we employ to define it, but is continually transforming the nexus of relations between them. Being, as it were, atrophy or hypertrophy, resulting in an inflammation or deficiency of one or another of its terms as it manifests itself in the spirit, i.e. in individual humans, peoples, cultures, or historical epochs (the "Zeitgeist"). Using the Aristotelian terms for general, individual and determination (katholou, tode ti and horos) Noica, half seriously as he himself admits, coins six pseudo-medical terms for these maladies of the spirit: catholitis, todetitis and horetitis for pathological excess, and acatholia, atodetia and ahoretia for pathological deficiency of one or more of the terms of Being as they manifest themselves through the spirit. One example is Moliere's Don Juan, which dramatises the condition of acatholia: the pathologically obsessive pursuit of the particular, exacerbated by a morbid rejection of the universal. Don Juan falls into the "bad infinity" of endless particulars, desiring to conquer and possess each and every woman in her unique individual being, while rejecting any universal notion of woman. Tolstoy, on the other hand, in the novel War and Peace, suffers from the opposite disorder - atodetia - in which individuals are crushed into insignificance by universals such as historical laws or abstract concepts like the "type of the Russian peasant"

Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit

Politics & Social Sciences

Constantin Noica

Philosophy

Cartarescu brings together twenty short stories that he wrote for ELLE magazine. The protagonist of every story is female, but they are not individual portraits of women - it is a group portrait of womanhood. The implied question to which the title 'Why We Love Women' introduces a series of narrative answers is not Why do you love women but Why do we love women The we refers not to men in general but to the multiple biographical selves and literary personae of Mircea Cartarescu, spanning early childhood, youth and manhood in the closed world of communist Romania and mature adulthood and middle age in a post-communist world of free travel and encounters between cultures (the book s settings include San Francisco, Ireland, Amsterdam, Turin, Paris and Krakow). The women of the title are real, imaginary, fictional, fictionalised, literary, intertextual, fantastical, oneiric, ideal, historical, contemporary, tragic, burlesque, mysterious, ordinary, strange, familiar, exotic, homely, perfect, flawed, ethereal, mundane, sacred and profane, each uniquely individual and at the same time universal in her beauty. Even when at their most (seemingly) biographical, the stories and articles of 'Why We Love Women' are self-consciously literary, intertextual and self-reflexive. In the first story, the epiphany of ineffable female beauty triggered by the young African woman on the subway from Berkeley to San Francisco is framed and introduced in terms of what J. D. Salinger calls in 'The Laughing Man' unclassifiably great beauty at first sight . Cartarescu's literary influences are modern and American; his reference point for the revelation of absolute, ineffable female beauty is not Dante's Beatrice but Salinger's Mary Hudson. But the woman herself seems to transcend all times and cultures: she is African and ancient Egyptian, wearing an Indian sari, her anklet inscribed in Arabic, and the snaking threads of her Walkman earphones are like an artefact from the dawn of time

Why We Love Women

Literature & Fiction

Mircea Cărtărescu

Short Stories & Anthologies

Contemporary madness in its entirety is summarised in Daniel Banulescu's play, set in an asylum populated with 12 dangerous madmen who are divided as believers of the four major religions. This is theatre in a world governed by insanity; as Dan Stanca remarks, the play could be set anywhere - in Pitesti, in the Siberian Gulag, in a Nazi concentration camp, Maoist or Khmer Rouge extermination camp, and, even, in one of the CIA s secret prisons... This is the principal merit and black humour of the play.

Who Won the World War of Religions?

Daniel Bănulescu

Small Changes in Attitude

Răzvan Petrescu

Lines Poems Poetry

Ivanescu, Mircea

Auntie Varvara's Clients

History

Tănase, Stelian

Russia

Relic

Wells, Liz

Beauty

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