1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910462518303321

Autore

Nissen Christopher

Titolo

Kissing the wild woman : art, beauty, and the reformation of the Italian prose romance in Giulia Bigolina's Urania / / Christopher Nissen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Ontario] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2011

©2011

ISBN

1-4426-9602-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (342 p.)

Collana

Toronto Italian studies Kissing the wild woman

Disciplina

853/.4

Soggetti

Painting in literature

Aesthetics in literature

Beauty, Personal, in literature

Electronic books.

Italy Civilization 1559-1789

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Reformation of the Prose Romance -- 2. Writing a Portrait -- 3. Ekphrasis and the Paragone -- 4. The Sight of the Beautiful -- 5. Kissing the Wild Woman -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.