Academic Book Week

Academic Book Week is a week-long celebration of the diversity, variety and influence of academic books aiming to open up a dialogue between the makers, providers and readers of academic books.

In celebration of Academic Book Week we have chosen five of our recent and upcoming publications to feature:

• The Tiger in the Smoke by Lynda Nead
  Taking an interdisciplinary approach that looks at film, television, and commercial advertisements as well as more traditional media such as painting, The Tiger in the Smoke provides an unprecedented analysis of the art and culture of post-war Britain. Art historian Lynda Nead presents fascinating insights into how the Great Fogs of the 1950s influenced the newfound fashion for atmospheric cinematic effects. She also discusses how the widespread use of colour in advertisements was part of an increased ideological awareness of racial differences.
  
  The Tiger in the Smoke is out now and available to purchase here.
  
  
• The Conversation Piece by Kate Retford
  Pioneered by William Hogarth (1697–1764) and his peers in the early 18th century, and then revitalized by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), the conversation piece was an innovative mode of portraiture, depicting groups posed in landscape or domestic settings. These artists grappled with creating complex multi-figured compositions and intricate narratives, filling their paintings with representations of socially, nationally, and temporally precise customs. Paying particular attention to the vibrant (and at times fabricated) interior and exterior settings in these works, Kate Retford discusses the various ways that the conversation piece engaged with the rich material culture of Georgian Britain.
  
  The Conversation Piece is out now and available to purchase here.
  
  
• Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales by Jill Francis
  The extravagant gardens of the 16th- and 17th-century British aristocracy are well-documented and celebrated, but the more modest gardens of the rural county gentry have rarely been examined. Jill Francis presents new, never-before published material as well as fresh interpretations of previously examined sources to reveal gardening as a practical activity in which a broad spectrum of society was engaged – from the laborers who dug, manured, and weeded, to the gentleman owners who sought to create gardens that both exemplified their personal tastes and displayed their wealth and status.
  
  Gardens and Gardening will be published in June 2018 and is available to pre-order here.
  
  
• The Pre-Raphaelites and Science by John Holmes
  This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. Offering reinterpretations of well-known works by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and William Morris, this major revaluation of the popular Victorian movement also considers less-familiar artists who were no less central to the Pre-Raphaelite project.
  
  The Pre-Raphaelites and Science will be published in June 2018 and is available to pre-order here.
  
  
• The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections by Robin Simon and MaryAnne Stevens
  This book is published to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. It tells the history of the Royal Academy from an unprecedented study of its great collections made possible by the first full catalogue initiated in 2008. The basis of those collections is the array of works presented by Academicians upon election, the Diploma Works, but many other works of art and objects of all kinds have been presented to the Academy. Together they offer a unique resource for the study of the history of art in Britain over the last two-and-half centuries.
  
  The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections will be published in May 2018 and is available to pre-order here.