ISBN:
9780199775088
Language:
English
Pages:
1 online resource (425 pages)
Additional Information:
Rezensiert in Rosenthal, Joel T. [Rezension von: Feldman, Martha, The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives] 2007
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als
DDC:
306.74/2/08621
Keywords:
Courtesans Cross-cultural studies History
;
Courtesans ; History ; Cross-cultural studies
;
Electronic books
Abstract:
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first to ask how arts have figured in the survival or demise of courtesan cultures by juxtaposing research from different fields. Among cases studied by writers on classics, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and various histories of art, music, literature, and political culture are Ming dynasty China, twentieth-century Korea, Edo and modern Japan, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Refusing a universal model, the authors nevertheless share a perception that courtesans hover in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, subtlety and flamboyance, feminine allure and masculine power, as wifely surrogates but keepers of culture. What most binds them to their arts in our post-industrialized world of global services and commodities, they find, is courtesans' fragility, as their cultures, once vital to civilizations founded in leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten, transforming courtesans into national icons or historical curiosities, or reducing them to prostitution.
Abstract:
Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Music Examples -- A Note about Languages -- Contributors -- Introduction -- PART ONE: Spectacle and Performance -- 1. Making a Spectacle of Her(self): The Greek Courtesan and the Art of the Present -- 2. Cutting a Good Figure: The Fashions of Venetian Courtesans in the Illustrated Albums of Early Modern Travelers -- 3. "Notes of Flesh" and the Courtesan's Song in Seventeenth-Century China -- PART TWO: A Case Study: The Courtesan's Voice in Early Modern Italy -- Introduction -- 4. The Courtesan's Voice: Petrarchan Lovers, Pop Philosophy, and Oral Traditions -- 5. On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song: The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa -- 6. On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric: Distance and the Madrigal Texts of Costanzo Festa -- 7. On Music Fit for a Courtesan: Representations of the Courtesan and Her Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy -- PART THREE: Power, Gender, and the Body -- 8. Royalty's Courtesans and God's Mortal Wives: Keepers of Culture in Precolonial India -- 9. The Courtesan's Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy -- 10. Defaming the Courtesan: Satire and Invective in Sixteenth-Century Italy -- 11. The Masculine Arts of the Ancient Greek Courtesan: Male Fantasy or Female Self-representation? -- PART FOUR: Excursus: Geisha Dialogues -- 12. The City Geisha and Their Role in Modern Japan: Anomaly or Artistes? -- 13. In the Service of the Nation: Geisha and Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country -- PART FIVE: Fantasies of the Courtesan -- 14. Going to the Courtesans: Transit to the Pleasure District of Edo Japan -- 15. Who's Afraid of Giulia Napolitana? Pleasure, Fear, and Imagining the Arts of the Renaissance Courtesan -- PART SIX: Courtesans in the Postcolony.
Note:
Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources
URL:
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=886614
URL:
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=886614
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