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Literary Criticism Spanish & Portuguese

Figuring the Feminine

The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature

by (author) Jill Ross

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Mar 2008
Category
Spanish & Portuguese
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802090980
    Publish Date
    Mar 2008
    List Price
    $106.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442691179
    Publish Date
    Mar 2008
    List Price
    $86.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442688100
    Publish Date
    Mar 2008
    List Price
    $80.00

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Description

Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective.

Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius' Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión's Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.

About the author

Jill Ross is a professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

Jill Ross' profile page

Editorial Reviews

"Figuring the Feminine builds a fascinating and compelling case about gender and textuality in medieval Iberian literature."

Ivan Canadas, Parergon vol 26:02:09