Female Beauty in Art: History, Feminism, Women Artists

In Female Beauty in Art, a series of essays examine the presence and role of female beauty in art, history and culture, and consider the ways in which beauty can function as a discourse of female identity. As a concept, female beauty is unique in that it can contain compelling imbrications of gender ideologies, images, relations, cultural constructions and modes of interaction between persons and the institutions that define their lives. Thus, female beauty can provide proliferating methods through which female identity is examined and analyzed. The book builds upon those ideas in a variety of areas in order to consider how the discourse of beauty can generate empowering insights into womanhood, female destiny and female identity. Female Beauty in Art is an invaluable resource for students and academics in the fields of literature, history, cultural and gender studies, rigorously engaging with female beauty's operation in discursive practices and cultural representations across disciplines and fields.