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Idle Pursuits
"Throughout this study, idleness is shown to be a key element of self-presentation beginning with the figure of the idle aristocrat. The extravagant display of a life of leisure made Gilles de Rais the icon of aristocratic idleness. But even the hardworking humanist was anxious to assume a studied posture of idleness. If both figures were eager to display idleness, it was because oisivete was an important source of what modern theorists have termed symbolic capital. Finally, the Renaissance also saw the birth of a new figure of the "idler": the consumer of leisure. For it was leisure itself along with chivalric and amorous adventure that was consumed by the readers of the popular Amadis series. At once a commodity and form of capital, idleness (otium) clearly belonged to the realm of social exchanges ostensibly reserved for affairs (negotium)."--BOOK JACKET.
Bluebeard
Bluebeard is the main character in one of the grisliest and most enduring fairy tales. A serial wife murderer, he keeps a horror chamber in which remains of all his previous matrimonial victims are secreted from his latest bride. She is given all the keys but forbidden to open one door of the castle. This is a major study of the tale and its many variants in English: from the 18th and 19th century chapbooks, children's toybooks, pantomimes, melodramas, and circus spectaculars, to the 20th century in music, literature, art, film, and theatre.
For Fear of the Fire
Why are contemporary secular theorists so frequently drawn to saints, martyrs, and questions of religion? Why has Joan of Arc fascinated some of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century? In a book that faces crucial issues in both critical and feminist inquiry, Françoise Meltzer uses the story of Joan as a guide for reading the postmodern nostalgia for a body that is intact and transparent. She argues that critics who place excessive emphasis on opposition and difference remain blind to their nostalgia for the pre-Cartesian idea that the body and mind are the same. Engaging a number of theorists, and alternating between Joan's historical and cultural context, Meltzer also explor...
The Kindness of Strangers
Using a wide variety of sources, John Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. He shows what happened to these children, and he illuminates the moral codes that condoned abandonment.
Perversion and the Social Relation
The masochist, the voyeur, the sadist, the sodomite, the fetishist, the pedophile, and the necrophiliac all expose hidden but essential elements of the social relation. Arguing that the concept of perversion, usually stigmatized, ought rather to be understood as a necessary stage in the development of all non-psychotic subjects, the essays in Perversion and the Social Relation consider the usefulness of the category of the perverse for exploring how social relations are formed, maintained, and transformed. By focusing on perversion as a psychic structure rather than as aberrant behavior, the contributors provide an alternative to models of social interpretation based on classical Oedipal mod...
Inside Bluebeard's Castle
This is a study of Bartok's opera ""Bluebeard's Castle"". It adopts a broad approach to the study of opera by introducing, in addition to the expected music-dramatic analysis, topics of an interdisciplinary nature that are new to the field of Bartok studies including a literary study of the libretto
Love's Litany
This is an extensive analysis of the relation of erotic philosophy to homosexuality in the modern period. The book focuses on homoerotic (mis)approriations and subversions of homoerotic conceptions of romantic love in texts by eight authors: Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, Ronald Firbank, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault and Roland Barthes. In doing so, the author both positions these authors as experimental and influential erotic theorists and protests against the critical undervaluation of love (as opposed to desire) in the construction of sexuality as we know it.
Blue-beard
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Game of Thrones and the Medieval Art of War
George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels and HBO's Game of Thrones series depict a medieval world at war. But how accurate are they? The author, an historian and medieval martial arts expert, examines in detail how authentically Martin's fictional world reflects the arms and armor, fighting techniques and siege warfare of the Middle Ages. Along the way, he explores the concept of "medievalism"--modern pop culture's idea of the Middle Ages.
