Product Description: Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals...read more

Product Description: What is beauty? Can it only be viewed in physical form, or can it be something deeper—an idea or feeling? Perhaps there is no better way to explore these questions of beauty than through poetry. Author Sheila Griffin Llanas discusses eight poems and poets, with chapters on William Shakespeare, Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, and five others...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Presenting a study of cosmetic culture and its visual representation on the Renaissance stage, this book examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatize the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. It analyzes the tracts that address the then contentious issue of cosmetic practice and identifies a 'culture of cosmetics'.

Product Description: Dust jacket notes: Aspiz contends that the exploration of Leaves of Grass as a work of art and as a spring-source of modern poetry must begin with Whitman's treatment of the human body. In his examination of such seminal poems as "Song of Myself" and "I Sing the Body Electric," Aspiz reveals a poet whose unflagging fascination with the body and nineteenth-century physical culture emerges as an inspired gospel of vitality and whose self-mythologized persona makes the development of the body a precondition for spiritual salvation...read more