Download or read book Monuments and Maidens written by Marina Warner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant examination of the allegorical uses of the female form to be found in the sculpture ornamenting public buildings as well as throughout the history of western art.
Download or read book Monuments and Maidens written by Marina Warner and published by . This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist analysis has shown how female images in art and advertising reveal society¿s attitudes, conscious and unconscious, towards women. This book provides a much-needed historical context for today¿s debates. It opens our eyes to the numbers of female figures that surround us, on stamps, on coins, standing guard over banks and courts of justice. Acclaimed historian Marina Warner¿s insights lead naturally into an exploration of the nature of the feminine itself. Why should Truth be a woman? or Nature? or Justice? or Liberty? Warner sets out to breathe some life into the army of petrified personages that litters western cityscapes. Her range of reference on female symbolism is enormous. Illustrations.
Download or read book Monuments Maidens written by and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Alone of All Her Sex written by Marina Warner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1983-03-12 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how the figure of Mary has shaped and been shaped by changing social and historical circumstances and why for all their beauty and power,the legends of Mary have condemned real women to perpetual inferiority.
Download or read book Figures of Speech written by Gloria Ferrari and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-01-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two hundred years, thousands of ancient Greek vases have been unearthed. Yet these artifacts remain a challenge: what did the images depicted on these vases actually mean to ancient Greek viewers? In this long-awaited book, Gloria Ferrari uses Athenian vases, literary evidence, and other works of art from the Archaic and Classical periods (520-400 B.C.) to investigate what these items can tell us about the ancient Greeks—specifically, their notions of gender. Ferrari begins by developing a theoretical perspective on visual representation, arguing that artistic images give us access to how their subjects were imagined rather than to the way they really were. For instance, Ferrari's examinations of the many representations of women working wool reveal that these images constitute powerful metaphors—metaphors, she argues, which both reflect and construct Greek conceptions of the ideal woman and her ideal behavior. From this perspective, Ferrari studies a number of icons representing blameless femininity and ideal masculinity to reevaluate the rites of passage by which girls are made ready for marriage and boys become men. Representations of the nude male body in Archaic statues known as kouroi, for example, symbolize manhood itself and shed new light on the much-discussed institution of paiderastia. And, in Ferrari's hands, imagery equating maidens with arable land and buried treasure provides a fresh view of Greek ideas of matrimony. Innovative, thought-provoking, and insightful throughout, Figures of Speech is a powerful demonstration of how the study of visual images as well as texts can reshape our understanding of ancient Greek culture.
Download or read book The Parthenon Enigma written by Joan Breton Connelly and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
Download or read book From the Beast to the Blonde written by Marina Warner and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1996-09-30 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark study of the history and meaning of fairy tales, the celebrated cultural critic Marina Warner looks at storytelling in art and legend-from the prophesying enchantress who lures men to a false paradise, to jolly Mother Goose with her masqueraders in the real world. Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?
Download or read book Managing Monsters written by Marina Warner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 1994 Marina Warner delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of six lectures, she takes areas of contemporary concern and relates them to stories from mythology and fairy tale which continue to grip the modern imagination. She analyses the fury about single mothers and the anxiety about masculinity in the light of ideals about male heroism and control; the current despair about children and the loss of childhood innocence; the changing attitude of myths about wild men and beasts and the undertow of racism which is expressed in myths about savages and cannibals. The last lecture, on home, brings the themes together to examine ideas about who we are and where we belong, with reference to the British nation and its way of telling its own history. Using a range of examples from video games to Turner's paintings, from popular films to Keats, Marina Warner interweaves her critique of fantasy, dream and prejudice.
Download or read book Persons and Things written by Barbara Johnson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons. In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.
Download or read book Women in the Classical World written by Elaine Fantham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-30 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now, the lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched Women in the Classical World lifts the curtain on the women of ancient Greece and Rome, exploring the lives of slaves and prostitutes, Athenian housewives, and Rome's imperial family. The first book on classical women to give equal weight to written texts and artistic representations, it brings together a great wealth of materials--poetry, vase painting, legislation, medical treatises, architecture, religious and funerary art, women's ornaments, historical epics, political speeches, even ancient coins--to present women in the historical and cultural context of their time. Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand-year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters report on the wild behavior of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the "new woman" represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper- and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Provocative and surprising, Women in the Classical World is a masterly foray into the past, and a definitive statement on the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome.
Download or read book Once Upon a Time written by Marina Warner and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From wicked queens, beautiful princesses, elves, monsters, and goblins to giants, glass slippers, poisoned apples, magic keys, and mirrors, the characters and images of fairy tales have cast a spell over readers and audiences, both adults and children, for centuries. These fantastic stories have travelled across cultural borders, and been passed on from generation to generation, ever-changing, renewed with each re-telling. Few forms of literature have greater power to enchant us and rekindle our imagination than a fairy tale. But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth, and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over a long writing life, and she explores here a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth. In ten succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations, in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Her book makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.
Download or read book Unruly Women of Paris written by Gay L. Gullickson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal, for example, raved: "Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers." Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
Download or read book Joan of Arc written by Marina Warner and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Commemorations written by John R. Gillis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory is as central to modern politics as politics is central to modern memory. We are so accustomed to living in a forest of monuments, to having the past represented to us through museums, historic sites, and public sculpture, that we easily lose sight of the recent origins and diverse meanings of these uniquely modern phenomena. In this volume, leading historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers explore the relationship between collective memory and national identity in diverse cultures throughout history. Placing commemorations in their historical settings, the contributors disclose the contested nature of these monuments by showing how groups and individuals struggle to shape the past to their own ends. The volume is introduced by John Gillis's broad overview of the development of public memory in relation to the history of the nation-state. Other contributions address the usefulness of identity as a cross-cultural concept (Richard Handler), the connection between identity, heritage, and history (David Lowenthal), national memory in early modern England (David Cressy), commemoration in Cleveland (John Bodnar), the museum and the politics of social control in modern Iraq (Eric Davis), invented tradition and collective memory in Israel (Yael Zerubavel), black emancipation and the civil war monument (Kirk Savage), memory and naming in the Great War (Thomas Laqueur), American commemoration of World War I (Kurt Piehler), art, commerce, and the production of memory in France after World War I (Daniel Sherman), historic preservation in twentieth-century Germany (Rudy Koshar), the struggle over French identity in the early twentieth century (Herman Lebovics), and the commemoration of concentration camps in the new Germany (Claudia Koonz).
Download or read book Women Who Fly written by Serinity Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beautiful apsaras of Hindu myth to the swan maidens of European fairy tales, stories of flying women-some carried by wings, others by clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, and flying horses-reveal the perennial fascination with and ambivalence about female power and sexuality. In Women Who Fly, Serinity Young examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. She considers supernatural women like the Valkyries of Norse legend, who transport men to immortality; winged deities like the Greek goddesses Iris and Nike; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; airborne Christian mystics; and wayward, dangerous women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Looking beyond the supernatural, Young examines the modern mythology surrounding twentieth-century female aviators like Amelia Earhart and Hanna Reitsch. Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories. This is vividly depicted, for example, in the twelfth-century Niebelungenlied, in which the proud warrior-queen Brünnhilde loses her great physical strength when she is tricked into surrendering her virginity. Even in the twentieth-century the same idea is reflected in the exploits of the comic book and film character Wonder Woman who, Young suggests, retains her physical strength only because her love for fellow aviator Steve Trevor goes unrequited. The first book to systematically chronicle the figure of the flying woman in myth, literature, art, and pop culture, Women Who Fly offers a fresh look at the ways in which women have both influenced and been understood by society and religious traditions throughout the ages and around the world.
Download or read book The Lost Father written by Marina Warner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like Visconti's film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mother's background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the early 1920's. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.
Download or read book Art As Religious Studies written by Douglas G. Adams and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2001-04-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
