Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund

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Format: 1 online resource (336 p.) : , 7 illustrations

ISBN: 9780822380276

Content: This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical.The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts.This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies.Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub

Note: Frontmatter -- , Contents -- , Acknowledgments -- , Introduction Genealogical Pleasures, Genealogical Disruptions -- , I. THEORIES OF REPRODUCTION -- , Generation, Degeneration, Regeneration: Original Sin and the Conception of Jesus in the Polemic between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum -- , Maternal Imagination and Monstrous Birth: Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata -- , 2. BOUNDARIES OF SEX AND GENDER -- , Contradictions of Masculinity: Ascetic Inseminators and Menstruating Men in Greco-Roman Culture -- , Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine -- , The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris, or, The Reemergence of the Tribade in English Culture -- , 3. FEMALE GENEALOGIES -- , Genealogies in Crisis: María de Zayas in Seventeenth-Century Spain -- , Incest and Agency: The Case of Elizabeth I -- , 4. THE POLITICS OF INHERITANCE -- , In Search of the Origins of Medicine: EgyptianWisdom and Some Renaissance Physicians -- , The Conflicted Genealogy of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and La Commedia -- , Hauntings: The Materiality of Memory on the Renaissance Stage -- , Index , In English.

Language: English

DOI: 10.1515/9780822380276

URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822380276

URL: https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780822380276