商品詳細

This is an investigation of how societies and cultures in different times and places have represented themselves in images and words, and of the ways in which such representations, which relate to religion, ideology and culture, have been resisted. It ranges widely across eastern, western, and African cultures, and over the last two millennia. Representations are basic to human communication and expression. They occupy a central terrain in social, political and cultural consciousness and identity - mimetic, symbolic, and fictive. But there is a basic contradiction about them which may lead to ambivalence. Jack Goody seeks to understand this process, and to show what it reveals about human cognition and its contradictions.The author explores the uneven distribution of figurative representations in human societies and at different times within the same society. He shows how prone representations are to change during and after revolutions, and explains the ambivalence that lies behind their absence or suppression: the widespread absence, for example, of figurative representation, and the decline of fictional literature, between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, and the suppression of theatre at that time and during the Reformation.Readably and accessibly written this book will appeal equally to anthropologists and historians, and to all students of culture, art history and literature.