Disabled bodies in early modern Spanish literature : prostitutes, aging women and saints / Encarnación Juárez-Almendros.
Material type: TextSeries: Representations (Liverpool, England)Publisher: Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2017Description: 1 electronic resource (viii, 201 pages)Content type:- text
- computer
- online resource
- 9781786940780
- 1786940787
- 9781786945013
- 1786945010
- Spanish literature -- Classical period, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
- Women with disabilities in literature
- Women in literature
- Sex role in literature
- Medicine in Literature
- Disabled Persons -- history
- Women -- history
- Body Image
- Literature, Modern -- history
- History, Early Modern 1451-1600
- Spain
- Literary theory
- LITERARY CRITICISM -- Feminist
- LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- Spanish & Portuguese
- Sex role in literature
- Spanish literature -- Classical period
- Women in literature
- Women with disabilities in literature
- 1500-1700
- 860.9/003 23
- PQ6066
- 2018 I-703
- WZ 330
Includes bibliographical references (pages 170-194) and index.
"Examines the concept and roles of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Ávila, a nun suffering from neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women's disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that--paradoxically--femininity, bodily afflictions and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths."--Page 4 of cover.
Introduction -- The creation of female disability : medical, prescriptive and moral discourses -- The artifice of syphilitic and damaged female bodies in literature -- The disabling of aging female bodies : midwives, procuresses, witches and the monstrous mother -- Historical testimony of female disability : the neurological impairment of Teresa de Ávila -- Conclusion.
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