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Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans' own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term »saudade« (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.
The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres ...
The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity. Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories, Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of identity. They offer candid portrayal...
Exploiting a link between early modern concepts of the medical and the literary, David Houston Wood suggests that the recent critical attention to the gendered, classed, and raced elements of the embodied early modern subject has been hampered by its failure to acknowledge the role time and temporality play within the scope of these admittedly crucial concerns. Wood examines the ways that depictions of time expressed in early modern medical texts reveal themselves in contemporary literary works, demonstrating that the early modern recognition of the self as a palpably volatile entity, viewed within the tenets of contemporary medical treatises, facilitated the realistic portrayal of literary ...
Sarah Siddons grew up as a member of a family troupe of travelling actors, always poor and often hungry, resorting to foraging for turnips to eat. But before she was 30 she had become a superstar, her fees greater than any actor - male or female - had previously achieved. Her rise was not easy. Her London debut, aged just 20, was a disaster and could have condemned her to poverty and anonymity. But the young actress – already a mother of two - rebuilt her career, returning triumphantly to the capital after years of remorseless provincial touring. She became Britain’s greatest tragic actress, electrifying audiences with her performances. Her shows were sell-outs. Adored by theater audienc...
An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.
One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century—from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of...
This study argues the thesis that John Donne's poetry, already well-served by the insightful close readings of earlier generations of scholars, can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual culture. It points out that the focus on visual culture allows for a non-monolithic, flexible reading of Donne's verse, in part because it acknowledges that while the complexity of his religious identity has been well-explored, the complexity of his secular interest has perhaps been less thoroughly examined. Since a study of early modern visual culture is deeply concerned with the vicissitudes of the image, both religious and secular, such a con...
Crown and Veil offers a broad introduction to the history and visual culture of female monasticism in the Middle Ages, from the earliest communities of Late Antiquity to the Reformation. Scholars from numerous disciplines offer a wide range of perspectives not to be found in any other single book on the subject, placing the art, architecture, literature, liturgy, religious practices, and economic foundations of these communities within a wide historical and cultural context. Long considered marginal to mainstream history, nuns and canonesses in fact had a profound influence on medieval culture. Revered and admired as models of piety, they commanded considerable prestige and exercised a significant degree of political power. Whether acting as producers or patrons of art, nuns were widely celebrated for their imaginative accomplishments. Focusing on the visual culture of female monastic communities in the German Empire, Frankish Gaul, Langobard Italy, and Anglo-Saxon England, this volume underscores the richness of largely unfamiliar material and its role in shaping distinctive forms of religious life.