You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Beasts and Beauties examines the relationship between domesticity and power by focusing on the contemporaneous development of the invention of the 'pet' and the delineation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure, where the pater familias ruled over his own secluded world of domesticated wife, children, servants, and animals.
The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature. The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief...
Refiguring Woman reassesses the significance of gender in what has been considered the bastion of gender-neutral humanist thought, the Italian Renaissance. It brings together eleven new essays that investigate key topics concerning the hermeneutics and political economy of gender and the relationship between gender and the Renaissance canon. Taken together, they call into question a host of assumptions about the period, revealing the implicit and explicit misogyny underlying many Renaissance social and discursive practices.
Polymorphous Domesticities maps out the play of gender, sexuality, and alternative forms of domesticity in the works of four modern European and American writers—Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Colette, and J. R. Ackerley. What these four writers have in common is a defiance of patriarchal paradigms in their lives as well as in their works. Not only did they live outside the norms of the heterosexual family unit, they also pursued and wrote about alternative lifestyles that prominently involved animals. Through close readings from a feminist perspective, Juliana Schiesari reconfigures the ways in which interspecies relationships inflect domestic spheres, reading the "Other" through the lens of gender, home, and family. As she explores how domestic life is refigured by the presence of animals, Schiesari challenges anthropocentric frames of reference and brings the very definition of "human" into question.
Spanning 24 centuries, this anthology collects over 30 pieces of Western writing about melancholy and related conditions. It unravels an ongoing conversation across centuries and continents as thinkers interpret, respond, and build on each other's work.
German society's inability and/or refusal to come to terms with its Nazi past has been analyzed in many cultural works, including the well-known books Society without the Father and The Inability to Mourn. In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women's feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s. After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages—Marianne Rosenbaum's Peppermint Peace, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother, Jutta Brückner's Hunger Years, Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane, and Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou. By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.
Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain. Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle an...
Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny. The essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and f...
The Daughter’s Way investigates negotiations of female subjectivity in twentieth-century Canadian women’s elegies with a special emphasis on the father’s death as a literary and political watershed. The book examines the work of Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Kristjana Gunnars, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Anne Carson, and Erin Mouré as elegiac daughteronomies—literary artifacts of mourning that grow from the poets’ investigation into the function and limitations of elegiac convention. Some poets treat the father as a metaphor for socio-political power, while others explore more personal iterations of loss, but all the poets in The Daughter’s Way seek to r...
A doubled-edged critical forum, this volume brings early modern culture and psychoanalysis into revisionist dialogue with each other. The authors reflect on how psychoanalysis remains "possessed" by its incorporation of early modern mythologies, vision, credos, and phantasms, which may--or may not--be applicable today. 23 photos.