1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910306640303321

Autore

Juárez Almendros Encarnación

Titolo

Disabled bodies in early modern Spanish literature : prostitutes, aging women and saints / / Encarnación Juárez-Almendros [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Liverpool, : Liverpool University Press, 2017

Liverpool : , : Liverpool University Press, , 2017

ISBN

1-78694-501-0

1-78694-844-3

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (viii, 201 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Collana

Representations: Health, disability, culture and society

Disciplina

860.9003

Soggetti

Spanish literature - Classical period, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

Women with disabilities in literature

Women in literature

Sex role in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Jul 2019).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- The creation of female disability : medical, prescriptive and moral discourses -- The artifice of syphilitic and damaged female bodies in literature -- The disabling of aging female bodies : midwives, procuresses, witches and the monstrous mother -- Historical testimony of female disability : the neurological impairment of Teresa de Ávila -- Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

'Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints provides a politically urgent critical approach to disability and female corporeality in early modern Spanish literary and social discourse. Rigorous in its historical contextualization and offering innovative, compelling readings of classic works, this book challenges familiar interpretations of women's bodies in texts of this period, transforming prior disciplinary boundaries and categories of analysis.'  Professor Susan Antebi, University of Toronto    'Blending historical context and literary text with disability studies method, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros sets out to challenge the foundations of early modern scholarship through a long-awaited critical feminist



examination of disability as both a social construction and an embodied material experience.'  Benjamin Fraser, Professor and Chair, Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences, East Carolina University    Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women's disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that paradoxically, femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths.