Full Description
Courtesans, hetaeras, tawaif-s, ji-s--these women have exchanged artistic graces, elevated conversation, and sexual favors with male patrons throughout history and around the world. Of a different world than common prostitutes, courtesans deal in artistic and intellectual pleasures in ways that are wholly interdependent with their commerce in sex. In pre-colonial India, courtesans cultivated a wide variety of artistic skills, including
magic, music, and chemistry. In Ming dynasty China, courtesans communicated with their patrons through poetry and music. Yet because these cultural practices have existed primarily outside our present-day canons of art and have
often occurred through oral transmission, courtesans' arts have vanished almost without trace. The Courtesan's Arts delves into this hidden legacy, unveiling the artistic practices and cultural production of courtesan cultures with a sideways glance at the partly-related geisha. Balancing theoretical and empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection is the first of its kind to explore courtesan cultures through diverse case studies--the Edo period and
modern Japan, 20th-century Korea, Ming dynasty China, ancient Greece, early modern Italy, and India, past and present. Each essay puts forward new perspectives on how the arts have figured in the courtesan's
survival or demise. Though performative and often flamboyant, courtesans have been enigmatic and elusive to their beholders--including scholars. They have shaped cultures through art, yet their arts, often intangible, have all but faded from view. Often courtesans have hovered in the crevices of space, time, and practice--between gifts and money, courts and cities, feminine allure and masculine power, as substitutes for wives but keepers of culture. Reproductively
irrelevant, they have tended to be ambiguous figures, thriving on social distinction while operating outside official familial relations. They have symbolized desirability and sophistication yet often been
reviled as decadent. The Courtesan's Arts shows that while courtesans cultures have appeared regularly in various times and places, they are universal neither as a phenomenon nor as a type. To the contrary, when they do crop up, wide variations exist. What binds together courtesans and their arts in the present-day post-industrialized world of global services and commodities is their fragility. Once vital to cultures of leisure and pleasure, courtesans are now
largely forgotten, transformed into national icons or historical curiosities, or reduced to prostitution.
Contents
Bonnie Gordon and Martha Feldman: Introduction
PART ONE: Spectacle and Performance
1: James Davidson: Making a Spectacle of Her(self): The Greek Courtesan and the Art of the Present
2: Margaret F. Rosenthal: Cutting a Good Figure: The Fashions of Venetian Courtesans in the Illustrated Albums of Early Modern Travelers
3: Judith T. Zeitlin: "Notes of Flesh" and the Courtesan's Song in Seventeenth-Century China
PART TWO: A Case Study: The Courtesan's Voice in Early Modern Italy
Martha Feldman: Introduction
4: Martha Feldman: The Courtesan's Voice: Petrarchan Lovers, Pop Philosophy, and Oral Traditions
5: Dawn De Rycke: On Hearing the Courtesan in a Gift of Song: The Venetian Case of Gaspara Stampa
6: Justin Flosi: On Locating the Courtesan in Italian Lyric: Distance and the Madrigal Texts of Costanzo Festa
7: Drew Edward Davies: On Music Fit for a Courtesan: Representations of the Courtesan and Her Music in Sixteenth-Century Italy
PART THREE: Power, Gender, and the Body
8: Doris M. Srinivasan: Royalty's Courtesans and Gods' Mortal Wives: Keepers of Culture in Precolonial India
9: Bonnie Gordon: The Courtesan's Singing Body as Cultural Capital in Seventeenth-Century Italy
10: Courtney Quaintance: Defaming the Courtesan: Satire and Invective in Sixteenth-Century Italy
11: Christopher A. Faraone: The Masculine Arts of the Ancient Greek Courtesan: Male Fantasy or Female Self-representation?
PART FOUR: Excursus: Geisha Dialogues
12: Lesley Downer: The City Geisha and Their Role in Modern Japan: Anomaly or Artiste?
13: Miho Matsugu: In the Service of the Nation: Geisha and Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country
PART FIVE: Fantasies of the Courtesan
14: Timon Screech: Going to the Courtesans: Transit to the Pleasure District of Edo Japan
15: Guido Ruggiero: Who's Afraid of Giulia Napolitana? Pleasure, Fear, and Imagining the Arts of the Renaissance Courtesan
PART SIX: Courtesans in the Postcolony
16: Joshua D. Pilzer: The Twentieth-Century "Disappearance" of the Gisaeng during the Rise of Korea's Modern Sex-and-Entertainment Industry
17: Regula Burckhardt Qureshi: Female Agency and Patrilineal Constraints: Situating Courtesans in Twentieth-Century India
18: Amelia Maciszewski: Tawa'if, Tourism, and Tales: The Problematics of Twenty-First-Century Musical Patronage for North India's Courtesans
Appendix: CD Notes and Texts
Selected Bibliography
Index
