Search results for ""author juliana schiesari""
University of Toronto Press Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance
The question of what it means to be human has preoccupied thinkers since antiquity. The classical humanism of the Italian Renaissance saw humanity as hierarchical, with elite European males at the apex while women, lower class or foreign men, and animals occupied varying lesser degrees of being. Using the theme of domestication to interrogate the intertwined notions of femininity, sexuality, and animality, Juliana Schiesari looks to early modern Italy to uncover the origins of the modern conception of the human. Beasts and Beauties examines the relationship between domesticity and power by focusing on the contemporaneous development of two phenomena - the invention of the 'pet' and the delineation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure, where the pater familias ruled over his own secluded world of domesticated wife, children, servants, and animals. Drawing upon canonical works and authors of the Italian Renaissance, Schiesari discusses how the figure of the animal resituates these works and provides a fresh perspective to how we as human beings perceive ourselves in relation to the world.
£39.59
Cornell University Press The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature. The pantheon of renowned melancholics—from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Walter Benjamin—includes no women, an absence that in Juliana Schiesari's view points less to a dearth of unhappy women in patriarchal culture than to the lack of significance accorded to women's grief. Through penetrating readings of texts from Aristotle to Kristeva, she illuminates the complex history of the symbolics of loss in Renaissance literature. Schiesari first considers the development of the concept of melancholia in the writings of Freud and then surveys recent responses by such theorists as Luce Irigaray, KaJa Silverman, and Julia Kristeva. Schiesari provides fresh interpretations of works by Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ficino and she considers women's poetry of the Italian Renaissance, key works by Tasso and Shakespeare, and the writings of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan. According to Schiesari, male melancholia was celebrated during the Renaissance as a sign of inspired genius, at the same time as public rituals of mourning led by women were suppressed. The Gendering of Melancholia will be stimulating reading for scholars and students in the fields of feminist criticism, psychoanalytic and literary theory, and Renaissance studies, and for anyone interested in Western cultural history.
£34.20
