Download or read book The Prodigious Muse written by Virginia Cox and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2012 Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenHonorable Mention, Literature, 2012 PROSE Awards, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers In her award-winning, critically acclaimed Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400–1650, Virginia Cox chronicles the history of women writers in early modern Italy—who they were, what they wrote, where they fit in society, and how their status changed during this period. In this book, Cox examines more closely one particular moment in this history, in many ways the most remarkable for the richness and range of women’s literary output. A widespread critical notion sees Italian women’s writing as a phenomenon specific to the peculiar literary environment of the mid-sixteenth century, and most scholars assume that a reactionary movement such as the Counter-Reformation was unlikely to spur its development. Cox argues otherwise, showing that women’s writing flourished in the period following 1560, reaching beyond the customary "feminine" genres of lyric, poetry, and letters to experiment with pastoral drama, chivalric romance, tragedy, and epic. There were few widely practiced genres in this eclectic phase of Italian literature to which women did not turn their hand. Organized by genre, and including translations of all excerpts from primary texts, this comprehensive and engaging volume provides students and scholars with an invaluable resource as interest in these exceptional writers grows. In addition to familiar, secular works by authors such as Isabella Andreini, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella, Cox also discusses important writings that have largely escaped critical interest, including Fonte’s and Marinella’s vivid religious narratives, an unfinished Amazonian epic by Maddalena Salvetti, and the startlingly fresh autobiographical lyrics of Francesca Turina Bufalini. Juxtaposing religious and secular writings by women and tracing their relationship to the male-authored literature of the period, often surprisingly affirmative in its attitudes toward women, Cox reveals a new and provocative vision of the Italian Counter-Reformation as a period far less uniformly repressive of women than is commonly assumed.

Download or read book Muse written by Ruth Millington and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating true stories of thirty incredible muses—and their role in some of art history's most well-known masterpieces. We instantly recognize many of their faces from the world's most iconic artworks—but just who was Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'? Or the burglar in Francis Bacon's oeuvre? Why was Grace Jones covered in graffiti? Far from posing silently, muses have brought emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity, and practical help to artists. However, the perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist. Could this impression be incorrect and unfair? Is this trope a romanticized myth? Have people embraced, even sought, the status of muse? Most importantly, where would artists be without them? In Muse, Ruth Millington's goal is to re-assess and re-claim that word in a celebratory narrative that takes ownership and demonstrates how outdated the common perception of that word is. Muse also explores the idea of ‘muse’ in a different way and includes performance artists and celebrities, iconic figures we perhaps haven’t considered before as muses, such as Tilda Swinton and Grace Jones. By delving into the real-life relationships that models have held with the artists who immortalized them, it will expose the influential and active part they have played in contributing to the artwork they inspired, and explore the various ways people have subverted stereotypical ‘muse’ roles. From job supervisors to homeless men in Harlem, Muse will reveal the unexpected, overlooked, and forgotten models of art history. Through the stories of thirty remarkable lives, from performing muses to muses who have been turned into messages, this book will deconstruct reductive stereotypes of the muse, and reframe it as a momentous and empowered agent of art history.

Download or read book The Refracted Muse written by Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique García Santo-Tomás unfolds in The Refracted Muse, the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence—not just among Spaniards working in the developing science of optometry but among creative writers as well. While Spain is often thought to have taken little notice of the Scientific Revolution, García Santo-Tomás tells a different story, one that reveals Golden Age Spanish literature to be in close dialogue with the New Science. Drawing on the work of writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quevedo, he helps us trace the influence of science and discovery on the rapidly developing and highly playful genre of the novel. Indeed, García Santo-Tomás makes a strong case that the rise of the novel cannot be fully understood without taking into account its relationship to the scientific discoveries of the period.

Download or read book Cultivating the Muse written by Ευφροσύνη Σπέντζου and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Download or read book The Drowned Muse written by Anne-Gaëlle Saliot and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine" (the Unknown Woman of the Seine), and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also called "The Mona Lisa of Suicide," has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is simlarly "a ghost story for grown-ups," narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It also investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Iconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue," casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.

Download or read book A Modern Muse written by Anonymous and published by Sagwan Press. This book was released on 2015-08-21 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book The Museum as Muse written by Kynaston McShine and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 14 - June 1, 1999.

Download or read book The Dual Muse written by Lorin Cuoco and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries an artist adept in one medium has found solace, encouragement, and inspiration in another, even to the point of merging them. Michelangelo put down his chisel to pick up his pen; Blake pictorialized his poetry; Max Ernst collaged narratives; Gertrude Stein adopted a cubist style. This bicameral interplay of the verbal and pictorial has never been more pronounced than in our own time. "The Dual Muse" explores a range of creative interrelationships between the visual arts and literary media in works by selected modern and contemporary artists and authors.

Download or read book Music s Modern Muse written by Sylvia Kahan and published by . This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Winnaretta Singer-Polignac, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, who befriended and subsidized some of the most important musical and literary artists of the 20th Century, including Stravinsky, Proust, Ravel, Cocteau, and Colette.

Download or read book Tragic Muse written by Rachel Brownstein and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rachel Felix (1821-58), the homely daughter of poor Jewish peddlers, was the first stage actress to achieve international stardom - and the last person one would have expected to resurrect the cultural patrimony of France. Yet her passionate, startling performances of the works of Racine and Corneille saved them from almost certain obsolescence after the fall of Napoleon (who had relished classical French tragedy) and the emergence of Romanticism. Audiences in Paris, London, Boston, and Moscow thrilled to her voice, and devoured the rumors of her offstage promiscuity and extravagance. Her fame - equal parts popularity and notoriety - was so great that she could nonchalantly dispose of her last name. La grande Rachel virtually invented the role of the superstar, while remaining a symbol of the highest art and most serious cultural pursuits. Indeed, her identity was fraught with such contradictions - which intrigued the public all the more. From the moment she was discovered playing the guitar on the streets of Lyons, to her debut on the Parisian stage at the age of fifteen, to her critical and commercial triumphs as Camille, Phedre, and other tormented women, Rachel's career was exhaustively "managed." A series of theater gurus, influential reviewers, and impresarios - including her brash and opportunistic father - claimed the credit for her astonishing success. What this abundance of male managers has always obscured is Rachel's own decisiveness and control over her time and money - not only did she play her various champions (and high-profile lovers) against one another, she openly defied them. Some called her stubborn, even perverse; in these pages, we come to recognize her as a woman ahead of her time, a charismatic individual very much in charge of her own destiny. As her fascination with all things Napoleonic suggests, Rachel liked power - both personal and professional - and had the talent to command it.

Download or read book Text Image and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth Century France written by Daniel Sipe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after the French Revolution, philosophers, artists, and social scientists set out to chart and build a way to a new world and their speculative blueprints circulated like banknotes in a parallel economy of ideas. Examining representations of ideal societies in nineteenth-century French culture, Daniel Sipe argues that the dream-image of the literary or art-historical utopia does not disappear but rather is profoundly altered by its proximity to the social utopianism of the day. Sipe focuses on this persistent afterlife in utopias ranging from François-René de Chateaubriand’s Amerindian utopia in Atala (1801) to the utopian spoof of J.J. Grandville’s illustrated novel Un autre monde (1844). He proposes a new reading of Etienne Cabet’s seminal utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie (1840) and offers an original perspective on the gendered utopias of technological inspiration that authors such as Charles Barbara and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam penned in the second half of the century. In addition, Sipe considers utopias or important readings of the century’s rampant utopianism in, among others, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Courbet. His book provides the historical context for comprehending the significance and implications of this enigmatic afterlife in nineteenth-century utopian art and literature.

Download or read book Federalizing the Muse written by Donna M. Binkiewicz and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Endowment for the Arts is often accused of embodying a liberal agenda within the American government. In Federalizing the Muse, Donna Binkiewicz assesses the leadership and goals of Presidents Kennedy through Carter, as well as Congress and the National Council on the Arts, drawing a picture of the major players who created national arts policy. Using presidential papers, NEA and National Archives materials, and numerous interviews with policy makers, Binkiewicz refutes persisting beliefs in arts funding as part of a liberal agenda by arguing that the NEA's origins in the Cold War era colored arts policy with a distinctly moderate undertone. Binkiewicz's study of visual arts grants reveals that NEA officials promoted a modernist, abstract aesthetic specifically because they believed such a style would best showcase American achievement and freedom. This initially led them to neglect many contemporary art forms they feared could be perceived as politically problematic, such as pop, feminist, and ethnic arts. The agency was not able to balance its funding across a variety of art forms before facing serious budget cutbacks. Binkiewicz's analysis brings important historical perspective to the perennial debates about American art policy and sheds light on provocative political and cultural issues in postwar America.

Download or read book The Violent Muse written by Jana Howlett and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an analysis of the phenomenon of the aesthetics of sexual and political violence, a central theme in European culture of the early 20th century.

Download or read book The Many Headed Muse written by Pauline A. LeVen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first monograph entirely devoted to the corpus of late classical Greek lyric poetry. Not only have the dithyrambs and kitharodic nomes of the New Musicians Timotheus and Philoxenus, the hymns of Aristotle and Ariphron, and the epigraphic paeans of Philodamus of Scarpheia and Isyllus of Epidaurus never been studied together, they have also remained hidden behind a series of critical prejudices – political, literary and aesthetic. Professor LeVen's book provides readings of these little-known poems and combines engagement with the style, narrative technique, poetics and reception of the texts with attention to the socio-cultural forces that shaped them. In examining the protean notions of tradition and innovation, the book contributes to the current re-evaluation of the landscape of Greek poetry and performance in the late classical period and bridges a gap in our understanding of Greek literary history between the early classical and the Hellenistic periods.

Download or read book The Companion to The Mechanical Muse The Piano Pianism and Piano Music c 1760 1850 written by Derek Carew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended as a supplement to The Mechanical Muse: The Piano, Pianism and Piano Music, c.1760-1850, this Companion provides additional information which, largely for reasons of space but also of continuity, it was not possible or desirable to include in that volume. The book is laid out alphabetically and full biographical entries are provided for all musical figures mentioned, including composers, performers, theoreticians and teachers, as well as piano makers and publishers of music, within the period covered by The Mechanical Muse. There are also entries on figures of importance from outside the period but whose influence is palpably important within it, such as J.S. Bach. As well as biographical information, all these entries contain lists of principal works and a section on further reading so that readers can follow up people and matters of particular interest. Also included in The Companion are entries devoted to particular works and other information of relevance, such as descriptions of musical forms, characteristics of dances and so on, as well as some technical information on music and explanations of technical terms pertaining to keyboard instruments themselves and to ways of playing them. This Companion is not intended to replace existing reference books such as Grove or Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, but will be useful for those who desire to know more about a particular topic and do not necessarily have access to more specialist reference works, or time to visit large or specialist libraries. As such it is indispensable to users of The Mechanical Muse.

Download or read book The Self as Muse written by Alexander Mathas and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there are countless philosophical and psychological studies that focus on sources of the self, narcissism has found relatively little attention in a pre-Freudian context. The Self as Muse fills this gap by examining various aspects of narcissism and their significance for the outpouring of creativity in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century German literature. In many Eighteenth-century works of the period narcissism refers to the creation of an idealized image of the self and the desire to merge with this image. It provided an impetus for poetic production as writers resorted to the Greek myth of Narcissus to express what they perceived as the inner workings of their soul. Yet they were also acutely aware of the vain, and therefore narcissistic, motivations for their explorations of the self. While those influenced by the Pietist tradition attempted to distinguish between an 'unselfish' self-scrutiny and self-indulging vanity, others like Goethe took advantage of narcissism's creative potential and integrated it into their aesthetic endeavors. The abundance of confessional and autobiographical accounts, the burgeoning of poetry drawing on personal experience, the emergence of a type of drama that is based on empathy, and the concern with an individual's ability to control one's senses and emotions in general testify to an unprecedented interest in notions of the self in German literature. MathSs explains the emergence of narcissism in the literature of the period as a sense-inspired concept that aims to bring about a better comprehension of both the self and other human beings, and how writers used narcissism to improve the moral behavior of their readers. It examines eighteenth-century representations of narcissism against the background of Freudian and post-Freudian notions of the concept, and explores narcissism as a creative process that engages both reader and writer in the production of meaning. By showing narcissism's pervasive allure for a broad array of literary productions, MathSs shows that narcissism is a constitutive force not only in literary production but also in the construction of modern subjectivity. Yet this construction is by no means complete and invites the reader to strive toward the illusive image of an ideal.

Download or read book Monet and His Muse written by Mary Mathews Gedo and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What sets this study apart from the vast literature on Monet is Gedo's focused, jargon-free, accessible, psychoanalytic assessment of Monet and his relationship with his first wife and mistress, Camille Doncieux, and the impact of this complex relationship on the artist's work. Using this psychobiographical approach in conducting a careful reading of primary source material and Monet's paintings, Gedo (independent scholar) does much to debunk a good deal of the mythology surrounding the artist's life at this period. She offers fresh insights into the content of many of Monet's major paintings, particularly his figurative works that feature Camille as a model or subject. So, for example, Gedo proposes that Monet's Camille (or The Woman in the Green Dress) from 1866, via its composition, "functioned as a metaphor for the uncertainty characterizing the relationship between lovers," in addition to exposing publicly Camille as Monet's mistress. As is the danger when applying psychoanalysis to the study of art history, some of Gedo's assertions and interpretations approach the level of implausibility; however, these flights of psychoanalytic fancy are few and far between. The writing is engaging, endnotes are extensive but not oppressive, and the book is sufficiently illustrated with many images in color. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Lower-division Undergraduates; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by D. E. Gliem.