The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674298713 ISBN 13: 9780674298712

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1986

Synopsis

The female body has occupied a central place in the Western imagination, its images pervading poetry and story, mythology and religious doctrine, the visual arts, and scientific treatises. It has inspired both attraction and fear, been perceived as beautiful and unclean, alluring and dangerous, a source of pleasure and nurturing but also a source of evil and destruction.

In The Female Body in Western Culture, twenty-three internationally noted scholars and critics, in specially commissioned essays, explore these representations and their consequences for contemporary art and culture. Ranging from Genesis to Gertrude Stein and Angela Carter, from ancient Greek ritual to the Victorian sleeping cure, from images of the Madonna to modern film and Surrealist art, the essays cover a wide spectrum of approaches and subject mailer. They all converge, however, around questions of power and powerlessness, voice and silence, subjecthood and objectification. And they point the way to the new possibilities and displacements of traditional male-female oppositions. Androgyny in a new key? This book demonstrates that a blurring of gender boundaries does not have to deny difference.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674298713
• ISBN 13: 9780674298712
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Suleiman Susan Rubin