Plain ugly examines depictions of physically repellent characters in a striking range of early modern literary and visual texts, offering fascinating insights into the ways in which ugliness and deformity were perceived and represented, particularly with regard to gender and the construction of identity.
Available in paperback for the first time, the book focuses closely on English literary culture but also engages with wider European perspectives, drawing on a wide array of primary sources including Italian and other European visual art. Offering illuminating close readings of texts from both high and low culture, it will interest scholars in English literature, cultural studies, women’s studies, history and art history, as well as postgraduate and undergraduate students in these disciplines.
As an accessible and absorbing account of the power dynamics informing depictions of ugliness (and beauty) in relation to some of the quirkiest literary and visual material to be found in early modern culture, it will also appeal to a wider audience.
Table of Content
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction: ugly subjects in early modern England
1. Theorising ugliness
2. ‘Charactered in my brow’: deciphering ugly faces
3. Opening the Silenus: gendering the ugly subject
4. ‘Sight of her is a vomit’: abject bodies and Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
5. ‘To make love to a deformity’: praising ugliness
6. Sacrificing beauty: defeatured women
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Naomi Baker is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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