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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $60.50

Format:
Paperback
424 pp.
52 halftones, 11 music examples, 229 mm x 152 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195170290

Publication date:
September 2006

Imprint: OUP US


The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Includes CD

Edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon

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.

Readership : Students and scholars of music, art, and women's studies.

Reviews

  • "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)
  • "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

Bonnie Gordon and Martha Feldman: Introduction
PART ONE: Spectacle and Performance
1. James Davidson: Making a Spectacle of Her(self): The Greek Courtesan and the Art of the Present
2. Margaret F. Rosenthal: Cutting a Good Figure: The Fashions of Venetian Courtesans in the Illustrated Albums of Early Modern Travelers
3. Judith T. Zeitlin : "Notes of Flesh" and the Courtesan's Song in Seventeenth-Century China

PART TWO: A Case Study: The Courtesan's Voice in Early Modern Italy
Martha Feldman: Introduction
4. Martha Feldman: The Courtesan's Voice: Petrarchan Lovers, Pop Philosophy, and Oral Traditions
5. Dawn De Rycke: On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song: The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa
6. Justin Flosi: On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric: Distance and the Madrigal Texts of Costanzo Festa
7. Drew Edward Davies : On Music Fit for a Courtesan: Representations of the Courtesan and Her Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy

PART THREE: Power, Gender, and the Body
8. Doris M. Srinivasan: Royalty's Courtesans and Gods' Mortal Wives: Keepers of Culture in Precolonial India
9. Bonnie Gordon: The Courtesan's Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy
10. Courtney Quaintance: Defaming the Courtesan: Satire and Invective in Sixteenth-Century Italy
11. Christopher A. Faraone : The Masculine Arts of the Ancient Greek Courtesan: Male Fantasy or Female Self-representation?

PART FOUR: Excursus: Geisha Dialogues
12. Lesley Downer: The City Geisha and Their Role in Modern Japan: Anomaly or Artiste?
13. Miho Matsugu : In the Service of the Nation: Geisha and Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country

PART FIVE: Fantasies of the Courtesan
14. Timon Screech: Going to the Courtesans: Transit to the Pleasure District of Edo Japan
15. Guido Ruggiero : Who's Afraid of Giulia Napolitana? Pleasure, Fear, and Imagining the Arts of the Renaissance Courtesan

PART SIX: Courtesans in the Postcolony
16. Joshua D. Pilzer: The Twentieth-Century "Disappearance" of the Gisaeng during the Rise of Korea's Modern Sex-and-Entertainment Industry
17. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi: Female Agency and Patrilineal Constraints: Situating Courtesans in Twentieth-Century India
18. Amelia Maciszewski : Tawa'if, Tourism, and Tales: The Problematics of Twenty-First-Century Musical Patronage for North India's Courtesans

Appendix: CD Notes and Texts
Selected Bibliography
Index

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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.

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