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Cinderella's Sisters
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history.Cinderella's Sistersargues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women-those who could afford it-bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism-as a way to live as the poets imagined-ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.
eBook
In the Blink of an Ear
An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present Marcel Duchamp famously championed a \"non-retinal\" visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty.
eBook
Sex before Sex
What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places?Sex before Sexmakes clear that we cannot simply transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays. The contributors confront how our current critical assumptions about definitions of sex restrict our understanding of representations of sexuality in early modern England.
Drawing attention to overlooked forms of sexual activity in early modern culture, from anilingus and interspecies sex to \"chin-chucking\" and convivial drinking,Sex before Sexoffers a multifaceted view of what sex looked like before the term entered history. Through incisive interpretations of a wide range of literary texts, includingRomeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, Paradise Lost, the figure of Lucretia, and pornographic poetry, this collection queries what might constitute sex in the absence of a widely accepted definition and how a historicized concept of sex affects the kinds of arguments that can be made about early modern sexualities.
Contributors: Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Will Fisher, CUNY-Lehman College; Stephen Guy-Bray, U of British Columbia; Melissa J. Jones, Eastern Michigan U; Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College; Nicholas F. Radel, Furman U; Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt U; Christine Varnado, U of Buffalo-SUNY.
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Modern art
\"Amy Dempsey unravels the all-too-often daunting language of modern art by mapping the styles, schools and movements that help us understand modern and contemporary art, from Impressionism in the 19th century to Destination Art in the 21st. Using a practical and easy-to-navigate structure, Dempsey's lucid writing and carefully selected artworks define sixty-eight essential groupings in western modern art.\"--From cover flap.
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Electronic literature : new horizons for the literary
A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study. Hayles’s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts. Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.
eBook
A new history of modern architecture : art nouveau, the beaux-arts, expressionism, modernism, constructivism, art deco, classicism, brutalism, postmodernism, neo-rationalism, high tech, deconstructivism, digital futures
In this book, Colin Davies subjects the canonical architecture of the twentieth century to a thorough reassessment. Rather than repeating the standard wisdom, Davies questions the values and judgements that are so often the mainstay of architectural surveys, and in doing so asks: what is the importance of the style we know as Modernism.
Book
The invention of monolingualism
Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguisitics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what \"monolingual\" means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers-Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language-have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry's increasing hunger for \"translatable\" novels.
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