The Courtesan's Arts
Price:
$35.00 (01)Description
Courtesans, hetaeras , tawaif -s, ji -s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. In Ming dynasty China and early modern Italy, exchange was made through poetry, speech, and music; in pre-colonial India through magic, music, chemistry, and other arts. Yet like the art of courtesanry itself, those arts have often thrived outside present-day canons and modes of transmission, and have mostly vanished without trace.The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, while touching on its equivocal relationship to geisha. At once interdisciplinary, empirical, and theoretical, the book is the first to ask how arts have figured in the survival or demise of courtesan cultures by juxtaposing research from different fields. Among cases studied by writers on classics, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and various histories of art, music, literature, and political culture are Ming dynasty China, twentieth-century Korea, Edo and modern Japan, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Refusing a universal model, the authors nevertheless share a perception that courtesans hover in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, subtlety and flamboyance, feminine allure and masculine power, as wifely surrogates but keepers of culture. What most binds them to their arts in our post-industrialized world of global services and commodities, they find, is courtesans' fragility, as their cultures, once vital to civilizations founded in leisure and pleasure, are now largely forgotten, transforming courtesans into national icons or historical curiosities, or reducing them to prostitution.
Reviews
"The book is the result of an extensive collaboration between scholars from numerous disciplines; the breadth and depth of information are evident from page one. From a musicological perspective, there is something here for anyone seeking to learn more about these marginalized performers.... For those in search of an intellectual treat, The Courtesan's Arts will prove to be a delicious indulgence."--The Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music
"The eighteen essays included in this thought-provoking volume demonstrate that multiple approaches to the creative arts of courtesans can do much to enrich our understanding of the central issues: gender, sexuality, musicality, and textuality. The first-rate production standards of this book, notable for generous illustrations of courtesans indulging their artistic creativity, are inserted on appropriate pages to correlate with the arguments of the authors. The contributors, editors, and publisher should be complimented on their leading-edge achievement."--Donna G. Cardamore, Music and Letters
"Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon have conceived, nurtured, and delivered a very successful multidisciplinary collection on courtesans and their artistic and cultural performance. A sharp focus, broad geographical and temporal scope, and substantial analysis mark a book of many merits. Sustained exchange among the contributors yields insight into both parallels and divergences among the varied cases."--Renaissance Quarterly
"The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives offers us a remarkably wide-ranging investigation into the lives of courtesans, from ancient to modern times.... It is a timely and extremely generous contribution to the mesmerizing courtesan cultures of the world."--Alexandra Coller, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture
"The Courtesan's Arts presents a remarkably rich and wide-ranging view of the social significance and cultural resonance of that most ambivalent yet seductive of women, the courtesan. Without forcing parallels among the various cultures and periods they consider, the essays in this volume illuminate one another in fascinating ways, revealing both universal and culturally specific aspects of courtesanship."--Ellen Rosand, Professor of Music, Yale University, author of Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre , Monteverdi's Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy (forthcoming), and authority on the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi
"Feldman and Gordon take a daring leap to consider the courtesan less for her sexuality than for her creativity. In this sumptuous collection, the courtesan's beauty is no longer dangerous but expressive. Like the courtier, she crafted herself as 'many things to many men' and integrated multiple arts in her craft."--James Grantham Turner, author of Schooling Sex (OUP, 2003) and editor of Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (1993)
Product Details
424 pages; 52 halftones, 11 music examples; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-517029-0ISBN10: 0-19-517029-6About the Author(s)
Martha Feldman is Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is author of City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (1995) and Opera and Sovereignty: Sentiment, Myth, and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century Italy (2006), and general editor of Critical and Cultural Musicology (2000-2002). Currently she is preparing The Castrato as Myth as the Bloch Lectures at Berkeley. She was named a Getty Scholar in 1998-99 and in 2001 received the Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association.
Bonnie Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Author of Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Europe (2004), she has published on female voice and contemporary female singer/songwriters. She has received awards from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Mellon Foundation.
