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Devil’s Rope

A Cultural History of Barbed Wire

Barbed wire cuts across more than just property, war and politics. This most vicious tool of control has played a critical role in the modern experience, be it territorial expansion or the settlement of local and international conflicts. However, it has other histories: those constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture. These representations – in painting, photography, poetry, personal memoirs, cartoons, novels, advertisements and film – have never before been critically examined. In this book, Alan Krell investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination.


Invented in France in 1860, barbed wire was developed independently in the USA, where it was used to control livestock on the Great Plains, both to "keep out" and "keep in". Promoted as the Ideal Fence, barbed wire’s menacing qualities were soon made manifest. The epithet, "The Devil’s Rope", anticipated its transformation into a tool of war in the late 19th and early 20th century. Henceforth, it would become synonymous with repression. Barbed wire’s conflicting character makes it an appropriate symbol of modernity, and Krell shows how the use of this symbolism in contemporary art has given barbed wire meanings beyond the historical and political realms.

Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.


224 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2002

Art: Art--General Studies

Culture Studies

Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography

History: General History


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Table of Contents

Preface: Looking through the Wire
1. The devil’s in the detail
2. Tortured bodies/touching sites
3. Making familiar
4. Entangled intimacies
5. Grasping the nettle
Postscript
References
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photographic Acknowledgements
Index

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