Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature - Hardcover

Ross, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802090982 ISBN 13: 9780802090980

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2008

Synopsis

Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective.

Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.

About this title

About the Author

Jill Ross is a professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802090982
• ISBN 13: 9780802090980
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320