Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the depiction of physically ugly characters in a striking range of early modern literary and visual texts, offering fascinating insights into the ways in which ugliness and deformity were perceived and represented in the era, particularly with regard to gender and the construction of identity. -- .
Trade ReviewA valuable compendium of cultural references'
Review of English Studies, vol 62 no 257
'Baker probes beneath the surface to excavate the deeper cultural concerns undergirding aesthetic anxieties. This book is much more appealing than its subject matter suggests, and is a contribution to cultural studies as well as to a neglected aspect of early modernity. A critic who flits so effortlessly from Bacon and Burton to Mikhail Bakhtin, Barthes and Judith Butler certainly deserves a broad readership.'
Willy Maley, The THE, 20th January 2011
Naomi Baker crafts a convincing argument about the inextricable link between physical unattractiveness and the female body based on a vast number of literary and cultural works from the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century.
-- .
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction: ugly subjects in early modern England
1. Theorising ugliness
2. ‘Charactered in my brow’: deciphering ugly faces
3. Opening the Silenus: gendering the ugly subject
4. ‘Sight of her is a vomit’: abject bodies and Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
5. ‘To make love to a deformity’: praising ugliness
6. Sacrificing beauty: defeatured women
Bibliography
