Beauty, Violence, Representation (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)

"This volume explores the relationship among beauty, violence, and representation in a broad range of artistic and cultural texts, including literature, visual art, theatre, film, and music. Charting diversifying interests in the subject of violence and beauty, dealing with the multiple inflections of these questions and representing a spectrum of voices, the volume takes its place in a growing body of recent critical work that takes violence and representation as its object. This collection offers a unique opportunity, however, to address a significant gap in the critical field, for it seeks to interrogate specifically the nexus or interface between beauty and violence. While other texts on violence make use of regimes of representation as their subject matter and consider the effects of aestheticization, beauty as a critical category is conspicuously absent. Furthermore, the book aims to "rehabilitate" beauty, implicitly conceptualized as politically or ethically regressive by postmodern anti-aesthetics cultural positions, and further facilitate its come-back into critical discourse"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 Acknowledgements 12 Introduction: Beauty, Representation, Violence 14 PART I Histories 40 1 “Þus for Thy Goode I Schedde My Bloode”: Violence and Beauty in the Late Medieval English Biblical Cycles 42 2 Staging Beauty; or, A History of Violence: Rending the Aesthetic in Jeffrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female Stage Beauty 55 3 Beauty, Violence, and the East: Paradigms of Femininity in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Oriental Narratives 68 4 “Hearts as Innocent as Hers”: The Drowned Woman in Victorian Literature and Art 80 PART II Aesthetics 98 5 Violence and Beauty: Jacques Lacan’s Antigone 100 6 “All Beauty Must Die”: The Aesthetics of Murder, from Thomas De Quincey to Nick Cave 113 7 Environmentality and Air Travel Disasters: Representing the Violence of Plane Crashes 133 PART III Resistance 150 8 Deconstructing Neoliberalism: Sledgehammering the End of History 152 9 A Queer Craving: Muscle and the Dynamics of Beauty, Homoerotic Desire, and Sadomasochism in Japanese Gay Pink Cinema 167 10 Subversion of the Violent Gaze: Sins Invalid and the Aesthetics of Disabled Bodies 182 11 Coming Home from Iraq: Women Warriors and Feminine Vistas of Violence 196 List of Contributors 212 Bibliography 216 Index 232