Description
Book SynopsisGiulia 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
Trade Review
‘Nissen offers to the modern reader of Bigolina’s Urania a comprehensive and erudite perspective on this author’s place in literary history…This is a book that will be useful to scholars in all fields whose research depends on historicizing and theorizing genre, gender, and representation.’ -- Stephanie Jed * Renaissance Quarterly; vol 65:03:2012 *
Table of Contents
Introduction 1 The Reformation of the Prose Romance Bigolina's Cultural Formation Elements of the Prose Romance The Plot and Characters of Urania The Prose Romance According to Boccaccio Urania in Its Literary Context Bigolina's Defense of Women 2 Writing a Portrait Bigolina and Aretino Portraiture in Urania The Caricature of Titian Of Mirrors, Istoria and Women in the Arts 3 Ekphrasis and the Paragone Ekphrasis in Western Literature Bigolina and the Paragone The Judgment of Paris Descriptio Mulieris Bigolina's Two Venuses The Book as Object 4 The Sight of the Beautiful Beauty and the Senses in Urania Sight in the Doctrines of Love The Body, the Gaze, and the Arts The Woman's Portrait as Gift 5 Kissing the Wild Woman Wildness in Urania Urania's (Nearly) Mad Flight Femina Salvatica The Game of the Senses Conclusion Appendix: Bigolina's Will in the State Archive of Padua Text and Translation Bibliography
