Beauty and the Abject

Autorentext

The Editors: Leslie Boldt-Irons is Professor of French at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada), where she teaches primarily twentieth-century literature and French culture and civilization. She translated into English Georges Bataille's L'experience interieure in 1988 and edited a collection of essays, On Bataille, in 1995. She has published and delivered papers on the works of Artaud, Camus, Blanchot, Malraux, Kristeva, and Baudrillard, among other authors.
Corrado Federici is Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada). He has translated from the Italian Luciano Nanni's Communication: The Power of Location: Essays on Adespotic Aesthetics (Peter Lang, 2000) and Biancamaria Frabotta's Italian Women Poets. An Anthology. He is also co-editor of Literary Texts and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2003) and Images and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits - Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2005). He has also written numerous articles and book chapters on modern Italian novelists and poets.
Ernesto Virgulti is Associate Professor of Italian and former Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada), where he teaches a variety of courses in Italian language, literature, cinema, and pedagogy. His publications and research interests include Medieval European and Italian literature (especially Boccaccio's Decameron), literary theory (narratology, semiotics), and Italian cinema. He also has published translations and a book on the playwright Luigi Pirandello's Cosí è (se vi pare).

Klappentext

This collection of eighteen essays explores the meanings and depictions of beauty and the abject in art (from Renaissance portraiture to the canvasses of Salvador Dali); photography and the representation of the body; film (from the horror genre and gay/lesbian sexuality to socio-political problems); literature (from classical lyric and pastoral drama to the contemporary verbal arts); cultural studies (from the femme fatale and James Bond to vampires and monsters); architecture; and linguistics. These essays not only examine the theme from a variety of media and critical perspectives, they also scrutinize and challenge traditional notions of beauty and the abject.

Inhalt

Contents: Barry Keith Grant: Children of the Day: Sex, Gender, and the New Horror Film - Bryn Gribben: «Compose Yourself' Through Impatient Gaiety»: How Dr. Jekyll Made a Spectacle of Himself - Catherine Heard: The Persistence of Monsters - Leslie Boldt-Irons: In Search of the Archaic Mother: The Space of the Abject in Bataille's My Mother and Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil - S.D. Chrostowska: A Passing Glance: Psychic and Aesthetic Encounters with Deadness and Dying - Bruce Elder: Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes (1933) - James Robert Allard: The Eyes Have It: Seeing the Beautiful in Gray's Anatomy - Sally Hickson: «Pretty Maids All in a Row»: Some Thoughts on Collections of Female «Beauties» in the Renaissance - Nancy Pedri: Portraiture's Unruly Faces: Beauty in Jo Spence's Putting Myself in the Picture - Anna Ghiglione: The Sensible Eye: Beauty and Abject in Ancient Confucian Thinking about Funeral Rites - Michael Johnson: «Honey Falling upon Honey»: The Angelus Couple in the Works of Dali - Marina Rodosthenous: «Beauty» and «the Abject» in the Cretan Renaissance Pastoral Tragicomedy Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis - Elizabeth D'Angelo: The Semiotics of Homosexuality in Television Commercials and Film: Diabolique and Bound - Erin Finley: One of These Days These Boots Are Gonna Walk All Over You: An Examination of the Femme Fatale's Evolution - Jim Leach: The Spymaster who Loved Me: M and the Gender Dynamics of the Bond Phenomenon - Peter Glidden: Beauty and the Beast within: The Glorious Bastards of Versailles - Carol U. Merriam: Sleeping Beauty: Propertius, Elegies 1.3 - John Picchione: Poetry and the Abject: The Case of the Italian New Avant-Garde.