| Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press Contributor(s): Charnon-Deutsch, Lou (Author) |
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ISBN: 0271019131 ISBN-13: 9780271019130 Publisher: Penn State University Press OUR PRICE: $94.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: December 1999 Annotation: Through the lens of cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch (Hispanic languages, State U. of New York-Stony Brook) frames her commentary on nuestros grabados (our engravings), the section in illustrated 19th century Spanish weekly magazines in which art critics instructed readers on how to view artists' images of idealized femininzty. These 192 b&w illustrations from the period of Queen Isabel II's 1868 overthrow to the end of the century embody male Romantic ideologies of women as symbols of beauty, desire, evil, bourgeois family values, exoticism, and political ideas. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism |
| Dewey: 305.409 |
| LCCN: 98-43335 |
| Series: Studies in Romance Literatures |
| Physical Information: 1.01" H x 8.82" W x 11.41" (3.12 lbs) 328 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or fictions of the feminine: she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, Charnon-Deutsch argues, were a response to, and also helped to create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behavior and poses. Further, they comprised a reassuring between-male cultural medium that provided graphic validation of women's docile body for a culture enthralled with femininity. Integrating the fields of literature and cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch's approach to this subject is unique. Many of the images collected here are available for the first time, and they represent only a fraction of the two thousand images Charnon-Deutsch collected during her research. This book will appeal to students of Spanish cultural studies and gender studies, as well as to art historians. |
Contributor Bio(s): Charnon-Deutsch, Lou: - Lou Charnon-Deutsch is Professor of Hispanic Languages at the State University of New York-Stony Brook. Her previous books include The Nineteenth-Century Spanish Short Story: Textual Strategies of a Genre in Evolution (1985), Gender and Representation: Women in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Realist Fiction (1990), and Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (1994). |
