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Taking a philological and feminist approach, and drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and on the poetics of transgression, The Ugly Woman is a unique look at the essential counterdiscourse of the celebrated Italian poetic canon and a valuable contribution to the study of women in literature.
An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era. Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives. Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century? As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics a...
This book is the result of a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Max Planck Institute) in Florence, Italy, in collaboration with the MaxNetAging Research School in Rostock, Germany. Adopting an innovative approach, it leads the reader through early modern Tuscan paintings to discover a new vision of intergenerational relationships. By studying both the images of elderly people in the scenes of Jesus’ Childhood and the primary sources dealing with old age, the book reveals how old age was perceived at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance in Tuscany.
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.
Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.
Giulia Bigolina's (ca. 1516-ca. 1569) Urania (ca. 1552) is the oldest known prose romance to have been written by an Italian woman. In Kissing the Wild Woman, Christopher Nissen explores the unique aesthetic vision and innovative narrative features of Bigolina's greatest surviving work, in which she fashioned a new type of narrative that combined elements of the romance and the novella and included a polemical treatise on the moral implications of portraiture and the role of women in the arts. Demonstrating that Bigolina challenged cultural authority by rejecting the prevailing views of both painting and literature, Nissen discusses Bigolina's suggestion that painting constituted an ineffectual, even immoral mode of self-promotion for women in relation to the views of the contemporary writer Pietro Aretino and the painter Titian. Kissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature.
Women’s Human Rights in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture sheds light on women's rights advancements in the nineteenth century and early twentieth-century through explorations of literature and culture from this time period. With an international emphasis, contributors illuminate the range and diversity of women’s work as novelists, journalists, and short story writers and analyze the New Woman phenomenon, feminist impulse, and the diversity of the women writers. Studying writing by authors such as Alice Meynell, Thomas Hardy, Netta Syrett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Seacole, Charlotte Brontë, and Jean Rhys, the contributors analyze women’s voices and works on the subject of women’s rights and the representation of the New Woman.
Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews...
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Despite the triumphs of the feminist movement, the cultural stereotype of the evil woman remains. Images of wanton, treacherous, malicious and monstrous females pervade art, literature, film, mythology, psychology and history. This eBook is a compilation of some of the papers presented at the 5th Global Conference on Evil, Women and the Feminine, and provides a collection of fresh perspectives on the construction of transgressive femininities. A core theme throughout many of the chapters is that the concept of evil is gendered, and what appears as a sinister action is often contingent on the gender of the perpetrator. While many behaviours are considered relatively unproblematic for a man, they are seen as evil when executed by a woman. The notion of female evil remains intimately tied to transgression and subversion of the norms regarding acceptable femininity.
"Theologians, poets, artists, and laypeople alike have been fascinated by Saint Mary of Egypt's legend since it was first recorded in the seventh century. Mary's prominence is religious and symbolic, encompassing sin and sanctity, the excesses of nymphomania and asceticism, the charms of nubile youth and the wrinkles of old age. In Promiscuous Grace, scholar of religion Sonia Velázquez thinks with Saint Mary of Egypt about what beauty has to do with holiness. With an archive spanning medieval Spanish poetry, Baroque paintings, a seventeenth-century hagiographic drama, and Balzac's treatment of Saint Mary in Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, Velázquez argues for the relevance of the appeal to the senses and the importance of the surface in religious texts. She draws on insights from philosophy, literary history and theory, and religious, visual and gender studies, and pays close attention to the texture of the words and images that make the legend of Saint Mary of Egypt come alive and remain relevant today"--