Kissing the Wild Woman: Concepts of Art, Beauty, and the Italian Prose Romance in Giulia Bigolina's Urania
© 2011
Giulia Bigolina's (ca. 1516-ca. 1569) Urania (ca. 1552) is the oldest known prose romance to have been written by an Italian woman. In Kissing the Wild Woman, Christopher Nissen explores the unique aesthetic vision and innovative narrative features of Bigolina's greatest surviving work, in which she fashioned a new type of narrative that combined elements of the romance and the novella and included a polemical treatise on the moral implications of portraiture and the role of women in the arts.
Demonstrating that Bigolina challenged cultural authority by rejecting the prevailing views of both painting and literature, Nissen discusses Bigolina's suggestion that painting constituted an ineffectual, even immoral mode of self-promotion for women in relation to the views of the contemporary writer Pietro Aretino and the painter Titian. Kissing the Wild Woman's analysis of this little-known work adds a new dimension to the study of Renaissance aesthetics in relation to art history, Renaissance thought, women's studies, and Italian literature.
Product Details
- Series: Toronto Italian Studies
- World Rights
- Page Count: 336 pages
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 0.0in x 9.0in
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Reviews
‘Nissen offers to the modern reader of Bigolina’s Urania a comprehensive and erudite perspective on this author’s place in literary history…This is a book that will be useful to scholars in all fields whose research depends on historicizing and theorizing genre, gender, and representation.’
Stephanie Jed
Renaissance Quarterly; vol 65:03:2012 -
Author Information
Christopher Nissen is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Northern Illinois University. -
Table of contents
Introduction1 The Reformation of the Prose Romance
Bigolina's Cultural Formation
Elements of the Prose Romance
The Plot and Characters of Urania
The Prose Romance According to Boccaccio
Urania in Its Literary Context
Bigolina's Defense of Women
2 Writing a Portrait
Bigolina and Aretino
Portraiture in Urania
The Caricature of Titian
Of Mirrors, Istoria and Women in the Arts
3 Ekphrasis and the Paragone
Ekphrasis in Western Literature
Bigolina and the Paragone
The Judgment of Paris
Descriptio Mulieris
Bigolina's Two Venuses
The Book as Object
4 The Sight of the Beautiful
Beauty and the Senses in Urania
Sight in the Doctrines of Love
The Body, the Gaze, and the Arts
The Woman's Portrait as Gift
5 Kissing the Wild Woman
Wildness in Urania
Urania's (Nearly) Mad Flight
Femina Salvatica
The Game of the Senses
Conclusion
Appendix: Bigolina's Will in the State Archive of Padua
Text and Translation
Bibliography
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