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The Value of Style in Fiction (The Value of)
by Garrett StewartThis is the first book to demonstrate the value of prose analysis - both appreciative and interpretive in its 'evaluations' - across dozens of authors, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. The Value of Style in Fiction is designed not just for students and scholars of the English novel - and its verbal 'microplots' - but also for anyone interested in mastering the art of the sentence by 'writing along with' its finest examplars in a fully descriptive account: a stylistic challenge in its own right exemplified by Stewart's multifaceted critical modelling. Beginning with a state-of-the-field survey of prose poetics, this manual of invested reading concludes with an 'Inventory' of terms (bolded throughout) drawn primarily from grammar, rhetoric, etymology, and phonetics, but also narratology and poetic theory: a glossary whose consultation can help cross-map certain verbal tendencies in literary-historical evolution and its separate landmark writers.
The Value of the Novel
by Peter BoxallPeter Boxall's The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.
The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature
by Tina SkouenThe stigma of haste pervaded early modern English culture, more so than the so-called stigma of print. The period’s writers were perpetually short on time, but what does it mean for authors to present themselves as hasty or slow, or to characterize others similarly? This book argues that such classifications were a way to define literary value. To be hasty was, in a sense, to be irresponsible, but, in another sense, it signaled a necessary practicality. Expressions of haste revealed a deep conflict between the ideal of slow writing in classical and humanist rhetoric and the sometimes grim reality of fast printing. Indeed, the history of print is a history of haste, which carries with it a particular set of modern anxieties that are difficult to understand in the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Many previous studies have concentrated on the period’s competing definitions of time and on the obsession with how to use time well. Other studies have considered time as a notable literary theme. This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which, only when taken together, provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the early modern mind. The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature surveys the period from ca 1580 to ca 1730, with special emphasis on the seventeenth century. The material discussed is found in emblem books, devotional literature, philosophical works, and collections of poetry, drama and romance. Among classical sources, Horace and Quintilian are especially important. The main authors considered are: Robert Parsons; Edmund Bunny; King James 1; Henry Peacham; Thomas Nash; Robert Greene; Ben Jonson; Margaret Cavendish; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope. By studying these writers’ expressions of time and haste, we may gain a better understanding of how authorship was defined at a time when the book industry was gradually taking the place of classical rhetoric in regulating writers’ activities.
The Value of Virginia Woolf
by Madelyn DetloffIn The Value of Virginia Woolf, Madelyn Detloff explores the writings of Virginia Woolf from her early texts to her challenging and inventive novels. Detloff demonstrates why Woolf has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of modernist experimentation and as a novelist of innovation and poetic vision who also exhibits moments of intense insight and philosophical depth. A famously enigmatic figure, Woolf's literary works offer different rewards to different readers. The Value of Virginia Woolf examines not only the significance of her most celebrated fiction but the function of time and allegory, natural and urban spaces, voice and language that give Woolf's writings their perennial appeal.
Value Relevance Of Textual Characteristics: Evidence from Annual Reports of U.S. Listed Firms (SIDREA Series in Accounting and Business Administration)
by Olga Bogachek Francesco GrossettiThis book explores the evolution of value relevance in finance and accounting. While synthesizing existing literature to provide a robust theoretical framework, it also extends the discourse by incorporating textual characteristics into the traditional model of value relevance. The authors integrate two pivotal but often disparate research domains: value relevance and linguistic analysis in accounting disclosures. This inclusion enriches our understanding of how qualitative factors, such as tone and readability in corporate disclosures, interact with quantitative measures to influence market behavior and investor decision-making. The result is a nuanced, multi-dimensional analysis that not only bridges gaps in current academic research but also offers new avenues for practical application. The book starts by laying the groundwork for the concept of value relevance, discussing its evolution in the academic literature, theoretical models, their assumptions, and limitations. It then turns the spotlight onto corporate disclosure theories, thereby illuminating the strategies and psychological factors that influence how companies report their financials and accompanying narrative discussions. The authors demonstrate how the information is strategically disclosed and received, adding another layer of complexity to the concept of value relevance. The novel contribution of this manuscript comes from the methodological approach, incorporating textual analysis techniques into a widely-accepted Ohlson value relevance model. The authors empirically integrate textual elements like tone and readability and demonstrate how they can play a significant role in how investors perceive a company. The empirical section of the book provides robust evidence to support the central thesis—that qualitative elements in financial disclosures are not merely supplementary but are indeed value-relevant. This enhances the book's applicability across both academic and practical settings. In conclusion, this book serves as a comprehensive guide for those interested in the complexities of value relevance as well as the dynamics of financial disclosures. It offers valuable insights that are both theoretically robust and empirically validated, making it a useful resource for academics, practitioners, and regulators. It enriches the academic discourse by offering new pathways for research and practical application in a world where financial information is increasingly digitized. The target audience for this book includes academics in the fields of accounting and finance, as well as practitioners and regulators who are keen on understanding the evolving dynamics of how financial information impacts the capital markets.
Values and Choices in Television Discourse: A View from Both Sides of the Screen
by Roberta Piazza Louann Haarman Anne CabornThe high-pressured, fast-paced environment of television production leaves little time for producers to reflect on how the potentialities of texts and images will be interpreted outside of the immediate broadcast imperatives. This volume brings together the producers and analysts of television in a formal and productive way.
Values in English Language Teaching
by Bill JohnstonThis book offers a new perspective on language teaching by placing moral issues--that is, questions of values--at the core of what it is to be a teacher. The teacher-student relation is central to this view, rather than the concept of language teaching as merely a technical matter of managing students' acquisition of language. The message is that all language teaching involves an interplay of deeply held values, but in each teaching situation these values are played out in different ways. Johnston does not tell readers what to think, but only suggests what to think about. Values in English Language Teaching explores the complex and often contradictory moral landscape of the language classroom, gradually revealing how teaching is not a matter of clear-cut choices but of wrestling with dilemmas and making difficult decisions in situations often riven with conflict. It examines the underlying values that teachers hold as individuals and as members of their profession, and demonstrates how those values are played out in the real world of language classrooms. Matters addressed include connections between the moral and political dimensions in English language teaching, and between values and religious beliefs; relationship(s) between teacher identity and values; the meaning of professionalism and how it is associated with morality and values; the ways in which teacher development is a moral issue; and the marginality of English language teaching. All the examples are taken from real-life teaching situations--the complexity and messiness of these situations is always acknowledged, including both individual influences and broader social, cultural, and political forces at play in English language classrooms. By using actual situations as the starting point for analysis, Johnston offers a philosophy based in practice, and recognizes the primacy of lived experience as a basis for moral analysis. Examples come from teaching contexts around the world, including Brazil, Thailand, Poland, Japan, Central African Republic, Turkey, and Taiwan, as well as various settings in the United States. This book will change the way teachers see language classrooms--their own or those of others. It is a valuable resource for teachers of ESL and EFL and all those who work with them, especially teacher educators, researchers, and administrators.
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age
by Hoyt LongIdeas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.
Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography (Routledge Approaches to History #21)
by Tor Egil FørlandBringing sophisticated philosophy to bear on real-life historiography, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography rekindles and invigorates the debate on two perennials in the theory and methodology of history. One is the tension between historians' values and the ideal—or illusion—of objective historiography. The other is historical explanation. The point of departure for the treatment of values and objectivity is an exceptionally heated debate on Cold War historiography in Denmark, involving not only historians but also the political parties, the national newspapers, and the courts. The in-depth analysis that follows concludes that historians can produce accounts that deserve the label "objective," even though their descriptions are tinged by ineluctable epistemic instability. A separate chapter dissects the postmodern notion of situated truths. The second part of the book proffers a new take on historical explanation. It is based on the notion of the ideal explanatory text, which allows for not only causal—including intentional—but also nomological, structural, and functional explanations. The approach, which can accommodate narrative explanations driven by causal plots, is ecumenical but not all-encompassing. Emergent social properties and supernatural entities are excluded from the ideal explanatory text, making scientific historiography methodologically individualistic—albeit with room for explanations at higher levels when pragmatically justified—and atheist.
The Values of Literary Studies
by Rónán McdonaldWhat is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India
by Michele Ilana FriednerAlthough it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India. Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact with nongovernmental organizations, with employers in the global information technology sector, and with the state. In contrast to previous political economic moments, deaf Indians increasingly depend less on the state for education and employment, and instead turn to novel and sometimes surprising spaces such as NGOs, multinational corporations, multilevel marketing businesses, and churches that attract deaf congregants. They also gravitate towards each other. Their social practices may be invisible to outsiders because neither the state nor their families have recognized Indian Sign Language as legitimate, but deaf Indians collectively learn sign language, which they use among themselves, and they also learn the importance of working within the structures of their communities to maximize their opportunities. Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India analyzes how diverse deaf people become oriented toward each other and disoriented from their families and other kinship networks. More broadly, this book explores how deafness, deaf sociality, and sign language relate to contemporary society.
¡Vamos! Let's Cross the Bridge (World of ¡Vamos!)
by Raúl the Third IIIWinner of the Pura Belpré Medal! A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book!Little Lobo and Bernabé return in ¡Vamos! Let’s Cross the Bridge, a joyful picture book follow-up to ¡Vamos! Let’s Go Eat about coming together and celebrating community from New York Times bestselling, three-time Pura Belpré Award–winning author-illustrator Raúl the Third.People are always crossing the bridge for work, to visit family, or for play. Some going this way; others going that way. Back and forth they go. With friends on foot and in bicycles, in cars and trucks, the bridge is an incredibly busy place with many different types of vehicles.Little Lobo and his dog Bernabé have a new truck and they are using it to carry party supplies over the bridge with their pals El Toro and La Oink Oink. The line is long and everyone on the bridge is stuck. How will they pass the time?
¡Vamos! Let's Go Eat (World of ¡Vamos!)
by Raúl the Third IIIWinner of the Pura Belpré Medal!Little Lobo returns to share his love of food and wrestling in ¡Vamos! Let’s Go Eat, a picture book follow-up to ¡Vamos! Let’s Go to the Market from New York Times bestselling, three-time Pura Belpré Award–winning author-illustrator Raúl the Third.Little Lobo is excited to take in a show with wrestling star El Toro in his bustling border town!After getting lunch orders from the luchador and his friends to help prepare for the event, Little Lobo takes readers on a tour of food trucks that sell his favorite foods, like quesadillas with red peppers and Mexican-Korean tacos.Peppered with easy-to-remember Spanish vocabulary and packed with fun details and things to see, this glorious celebration of food is sure to leave every reader hungry for lunch!
¡Vamos! Let's Go Read (World of ¡Vamos!)
by Raúl the Third IIIFrom New York Times bestselling, Pura Belpré Award–winning author-illustrator Raúl the Third, ¡Vamos! Let's Go Read follows Little Lobo and friends as they explore their library's Libro Love Book Festival in this picture book from the World of ¡Vamos!Little Lobo and his friends are excited for the out-of-this-world book festival the Guadalupian Library hosts every year!Everyone has a special book they're looking for, but there's so much to see and do first. From cookbook demonstrations and comics workshops to mask making and language classes, this library has something for everyone. Can Little Lobo, Bernabé, Kooky Dooky, Coco Rocho, and La Chida each find the book of their dreams?Full of easy-to-remember Spanish vocabulary and packed with fun details, this colorful celebration of books, libraries, and all forms of reading will bring joy to young bookworms everywhere!
¡Vamos! Let's Go to the Market (World of ¡Vamos!)
by Raúl the Third IIIAn Eisner Award Nominee! A Pura Belpré Award Honor Book!Explore the marketplace of a buzzing Mexican-American border town in ¡Vamos! Let’s Go to the Market, a picture book from New York Times bestselling, three-time Pura Belpré Award–winning author-illustrator Raúl the Third.Bilingual in a new way, this colorful adventure teaches readers simple words in Spanish as they experience the bustling life of a border town. Follow Little Lobo and his dog Bernabe as they deliver supplies to a variety of vendors, selling everything from sweets to sombreros, portraits to piñatas, carved masks to comic books!
The Vampire: A New History
by Nick GroomAn authoritative new history of the vampire, two hundred years after it first appeared on the literary scene Published to mark the bicentenary of John Polidori’s publication of The Vampyre, Nick Groom’s detailed new account illuminates the complex history of the iconic creature. The vampire first came to public prominence in the early eighteenth century, when Enlightenment science collided with Eastern European folklore and apparently verified outbreaks of vampirism, capturing the attention of medical researchers, political commentators, social theorists, theologians, and philosophers. Groom accordingly traces the vampire from its role as a monster embodying humankind’s fears, to that of an unlikely hero for the marginalized and excluded in the twenty-first century. Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.
The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
by Lorna Piatti-FarnellProminent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature
by Carol A. SenfCarol A. Senf traces the vampire’s evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Feast of Blood (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Brooke CameronAgainst the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The figure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its climax in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book includes chapters on Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many “Other” vampire stories of the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fiction by George MacDonald; time discipline in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death; fragile female vampires in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne;” cultural appropriation in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the racialized Other in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. While drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as “Other” tells us much about Victorian culture and readers’ fears or desires.
Vampires: A Field Guide to the Creatures that Stalk the Night
by Bob CurranA guide to the origins and legends of undead mythological monsters from around the world.“Vampire!” The very word conjures up visions of ruined castles, of enigmatic, pale-skinned noblemen shrouded in dark cloaks, of slumbering beauties being bloodily ravished by supernatural, nocturnal creatures. But just how accurate is that picture? How much do we really know about these mysterious entities? Surprisingly, perhaps, almost every culture can boast of its own vampire beings, few of which correspond to the stock Hollywood image—some are not even human in form, some do not drink blood, some appear in daylight. Are you ready for such horrors as the Penangal, the screaming blood-soaked lead that drifts through the Malayan jungle seeking victims; the Jaracacca, the Brazilian stalker that hides in the clothes of its victims to drink their blood or bodily fluids; or the Aswang, the scaly demon of the Philippines, who lies among the leafy roofs of huts and drinks through its tongue? And how do we dispose of vampires? Is the simple stake through the heart—much beloved of Hollywood directors—really enough, or is there something more? And does the sight of the crucifix repel all vampires—what if the vampire is Jewish (a dibbyuk)? Vampires is a unique, lavishly illustrated work that explores the rich diversity of vampire belief and lore, ranging from countries as diverse as Japan, Sweden, and Ireland, looking at their historical origins, and setting them in their cultural context.
Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side
by Margot AdlerThe author of Drawing Down the Moon offers a "literate, imaginative, and just plain fascinating&” exploration of the enduring allure of vampires (Whitley Strieber, author of The Hunger). Author and NPR correspondent Margot Adler found herself newly drawn to vampire novels while sitting vigil at her dying husband&’s bedside. Intrigued by the way this ever-evolving myth lets us contemplate mortality, she embarked on a years-long journey of reading hundreds vampire novels—from teen to adult, from gothic to modern, from detective to comic. She began to see just how each era creates the vampires it needs. Dracula, an Eastern European monster, was the perfect vehicle for 19th-century England&’s fear of outsiders and of disease seeping in through its large ports. In 1960s America, the television show Dark Shadows gave us the morally conflicted vampire struggling against his own predatory nature, who still enthralls us today. From Bram Stoker to Ann Rice; from vampire detective thrillers to lesbian vampire fiction; and from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight and True Blood, Vampires Are Us explores the issues of power, politics, morality, identity, and even the fate of the planet that show up in vampire novels today. Perhaps, Adler suggests, our blood is oil, perhaps our prey is the planet. Perhaps vampires are us.
Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality
by Paul BarberIn this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. From the tale of a sixteenth-century shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost terrorized everyone in the city, to the testimony of a doctor who presided over the exhumation and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian vampires, his book is fascinating reading.
Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
by David GloverNearly a hundred years after its debut in 1897, Dracula is still one of the most popular of all Gothic narratives, always in print and continually adapted for stage and screen. Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances of the novel's production. By way of a long overdue return to the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and correspondence of Bram Stoker, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals reconstructs the cultural and political world that gave birth to Dracula. To bring Stoker's life into productive relationship with his writing, Glover offers a reading that locates the author within the changing commercial contours of the late-Victorian public sphere and in which the methods of critical biography are displaced by those of cultural studies.Glover's efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition's contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker's writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences--from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology--that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker's writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure.Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.
The Van and the Hot Rod (Primary Phonics Storybook #Set 1A Book 3)
by Barbara W. MakarA systematic, phonics-based early reading program that includes: the most practice for every skill, decodable readers for every skill, and reinforcement materials--help struggling students succeed in the regular classroom
Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive
by Russ RamseyBeyond a mere introduction to great art, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart is about loving to learn what art has to teach us about the wonder and struggle of being alive.Did you know that:Vincent van Gogh's attempt to start an artist's colony with Paul Gauguin lasted only nine weeks, ending in his infamous "ear episode"?Pablo Picasso was a prime suspect in the disappearance of the Mona Lisa?Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony at her own rapist's trial?Norman Rockwell's critics said his work would never be accepted as "high art"--and he agreed?These stories--and many more--shaped the work these artists left behind. In their art are lessons common to the human experience about the wonder and struggle of being alive: dreams lost, perspectives changed, and humility derived through suffering.??In Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart, Russ Ramsey digs into these artists' stories for readers who may be new to art, as well as for lifelong students of art history, to mine the transcendent beauty and hard lessons we can take from their masterpieces and their lives. Each story from some of the history's most celebrated artists applies the beauty of the gospel in a way that speaks to the suffering and hope we all face.