Brasses and brass rubbing Suzanne Beedell; rubbings by Terence Cook, Suzanne Beedell, and Ginette Leach; photographs of rubbings and brasses by Suzanne Beedell

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beedell, Suzanne Mollie, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Brasses.

Brass rubbing.

Physical Description:

96 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Bartholomew, 1973.

Summary:

In this extraordinarily rich book, Madelyn Gutwirth examines over one hundred prints and paintings, dozens of texts, and the work of a great many cultural critics in order to consider how gender politics were played out during a highly volatile era. Finding evidence of a crisis in gender relations during the eighteenth century, she traces its evolution in the politics of rococo art, demographic trends, plans for the control of prostitution, maternal nursing and wet-nursing practices, folklore, the salon, and in the theater of Diderot and the polemics of Rousseau. Gutwirth shows how a hostile gender ideology consigned women to a solely mothering role before the political revolution began, and how women who struggled to participate in the nascent First French Republic found themselves hobbled by the representational practices of the revolutionaries, especially their use of allegory. The artificiality and anachronism of the Revolution's representation of women were ratified by the Napoleonic Code. Once depicted as erotic goddesses by the rococo, then as goddesses of liberty (Marianne), the dominant figuration of women around 1800 would become the dying waif. As modern republics began their struggle toward legitimacy, women's posture within them had been reduced, by representation, to feeble marginality. Gutwirth combines perspectives from literature, history, sociology, demography, psychology, and art history and criticism in her delineation of this crisis.

Contents:

Gendered rococo as political provocation

Infant eros and human infant

Social woman : between nature and culture

The war of the sexes : from the fall of Merteuil to the rise of Brutus

Women's early revolution

Goddesses and allegories

The limits to women's action as empowerment, 1792-1795

The Maenad factor, or sex, politics, and murderousness

Caritas and the Republic : imageries of the breast.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 94) and index.

ISBN:

0851529399

9780851529394

OCLC:

1091988