The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives Includes CDMartha Feldman, 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. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans' arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case studies--the Edo period and modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's survival or demise. Though performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on social distinction while operating outside official familial relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet often been reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, courtesans are now largely forgotten, transformed into national icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution. |
Contents
Making a Spectacle of Herself The Greek Courtesan and the Art of the Present | 29 |
Cutting a Good Figure The Fashions of Venetian Courtesans in the Illustrated Albums of Early Modern Travelers | 52 |
Notes of Flesh and the Courtesans Song in SeventeenthCentury China | 75 |
A Case Study The Courtesans Voice in Early Modern Italy | 101 |
Introduction | 103 |
The Courtesans Voice Petrarchan Lovers Pop Philosophy and Oral Traditions | 105 |
On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa | 124 |
On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric Distance and the Madrigal Texts of Costanzo Festa | 133 |
Excursus Geisha Dialogues | 221 |
The City Geisha and Their Role in Modern Japan Anomaly or Artistes? | 223 |
In the Service of the Nation Geisha and Kawabata Yasunaris Snow Country | 243 |
Fantasies of the Courtesan | 253 |
Going to the Courtesans Transit to the Pleasure District of Edo Japan | 255 |
Whos Afraid of Giuliana Napolitana? Pleasure Fear and Imagining the Arts of the Renaissance Courtesan | 280 |
Courtesans in the Postcolony | 293 |
The TwentiethCentury Disappearance of the Gisaeng during the Rise of Koreas Modern SexandEntertainment Industry | 295 |
On Music Fit for a Courtesan Representations of the Courtesan and Her Music in SixteenthCentury Italy | 144 |
Power Gender and the Body | 159 |
Royaltys Courtesans and Gods Mortal Wives Keepers of Culture in Precolonial India | 161 |
The Courtesans Singing Body as Cultural Capital in SeventeenthCentury Italy | 182 |
Defaming the Courtesan Satire and Invective in SixteenthCentury Italy | 199 |
The Masculine Arts of the Ancient Greek Courtesan Male Fantasy or Female Selfrepresentation? | 209 |
Other editions - View all
The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives Includes CD Martha Feldman,Bonnie Gordon Limited preview - 2006 |
The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-cultural Perspectives Martha Feldman,Bonnie Gordon No preview available - 2006 |