Bücher von Robert Dixon

Australian and international modernity from the late 19th to the mid-20th century inspires research in many fields of cultural endeavour: architecture, fine arts, design, cinema, theatre, and music; in urban studies, literary history and Aboriginal studies. Impact of the Modern brings together examples of this new interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars. Their writings reveal an original account of 'modernising' Australia as dynamic and creative in many art forms, and interactively linked with international processes and ideas.The essays in Impact of the Modern were presented as papers at the conference, 'Australian Vernacular Modernities', convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in 2006. Plenary papers by Jill Julius Matthews and Angela Woollacott signal the book's focus on the erotic and gendered spaces, and on popular aspects of modernity. They provide the central focus of the material, through such vital and dynamic categories as the 'modern', the 'erotic' and the 'primitive'. As essential components of the historical processes of innovation and modernisation, these central questions of gender and public sociality are taken up in diverse ways in the other chapters, forming a varied and exciting study of a range of creative Australian engagements with modern international life and popular culture.

This book is an exploration of popular late nineteenth-century texts. Robert Dixon looks at a selection of adventure/romance writers whose narrative themes, he argues, captured many aspects of imperial ideology. Here is an original approach to popular fiction, both for its own sake and as a mode of cultural history.

Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.'Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity' is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia's engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley's life - the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars - but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his 'synchronized lecture entertainments'.These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley's photographic and filmic texts - which were often produced and presented by other people - and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley's creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century's rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of 'colonial modernity'.

Church leaders caught in immoral behavior and the cover-up of physical, sexual, spiritual, and psychological abuse-authoritarian leaders who insist on maintaining control over the flock while wreaking havoc and causing profound emotional, spiritual, and psychological stress, including the need for psychiatric hospitalization, while some even succumb to suicide. Congregations riddled with broken relationships, divided families, separation, divorce, and children who reject God or anything having to do with church!Why is this happening? What is the cause and culprit of such upheaval in the church today? Is there a remedy?Just like King David, who sent Uriah to his death in order to cover up his own scandalous behavior, many leaders in the church today are willing to sacrifice individual members and even entire congregations in order to maintain power and control over the church and choose to cover up horrendous abuse in order to preserve their reputations.God never intended it to be this way. Yet why do many congregations find themselves in such a precarious position? The church-who is the fullness of Christ, the pillar and foundation of the truth-was never meant to cower before power-mongering leaders who take Scripture out of context in order to advance their own agendas and propagate a legalistic and performance-based culture in the church.Bob Dixon has written an insightful and compelling book that answers these and other questions, as well as provides a surprising answer for individuals and churches who suffer from these pernicious but avoidable problems that find their root in the misuse and abuse of authority in the church, what he refers to as-the Uriah syndrome.