Description
Book SynopsisThis volume deals with the enduring presence of one of Western culture's most fascinating and influential figures in ancient, modern, and postmodern art and literature: Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality. The collection, which is the first of its kind, seeks to explore Venus's significance as a figure of beauty and creativity across cultures and disciplines, engaging a range of media, theoretical approaches, and cultural perspectives. Thirteen international scholars—including Elisabeth Bronfen, Tom Conley, Laurence Rickels, and Barbara Vinken—illuminate Venus's lasting value as a multifaceted figure of the creative in Western culture, from Lucretius to Michel Serres.
Trade Review“The strength of the collection is its emphasis on historical continuity: Western culture, it seems, frequently drawing on Oriental models, has always had need of a love goddess. She has just taken different forms as social contexts have evolved down the last two millennia.” - Julian Preece, Swansea University, in: Modern Language Review 111.2 (2016), pp. 534-535
Table of ContentsContents Introduction GÜNTER BLAMBERGER Venus as Muse. A Contradictory Thought-Image? 9 SEBASTIAN GOTH Venus Anadyomene. The Birth of Art 15 ELIZABETH ASMIS Venus and the Passion for Renewal in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things 41 Visual & Performing Arts JENNIFER SHAW The Figure of Venus. Rhetoric of the Ideal from Cabanel to Claude Cahun 57 JEANETTE KOHL Intra-Venus 73 Literature SEBASTIAN GOTH Venus as Muse. Toward a Poetics of Lust 121 RUDOLF DRUX “The Most Blessed Goddess” Venus as the ‘Ally’ of the Poet (in) Heinrich Heine 149 TOM CONLEY Venus Backwards. From Rimbaud to Ronsard 163 BARBARA VINKEN Nana: Venus a rebours. Paris of the Second Empire as the Return of Rome and Babylon 173 HANJO BERRESSEM The Transit of Venus 199 Film, Media, Theory LAURENCE RICKELS Venus Barbata 221 ELISABETH BRONFEN Cleopatra’s Venus 235 COLIN GARDNER Samuel Beckett’s ‘Peephole’ Venus. Re-Sexualization, The Oral Mother, and the Masochist Contract in Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and …but the clouds… 251 PATRICIA MACCORMACK Venusian Ecosophy 265 Contributors 281
