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From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production
Editor: V.G. Julie Rajan and Sanja Bahun-Radunović
Date Of Publication: May 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0537-7
Isbn: 1-4438-0537-8
From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is an innovative collection of essays on female aesthetic production and myth, examining the ways in which women artists and writers utilize myth to negotiate their perceptions of feminine identity and feminine representation in an increasingly complex and culturally hybrid world. The featured essays and artistic contributions address a variety of contemporary female productions, including literature, performance, and visual art, in a markedly global scope. Representing a wide range of cultures, languages, geographic locales, and social contexts—from Jewish-Hindu and Kenyan-German, through Irish, Italian, American, to Vietnamese folktales—this diversified selection underscores the agency of “the feminine gaze” across a historical and geopolitical span, a gaze through which myths from various cultures and different cultural amalgams speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is linked to the potential of myth simultaneously to encompass and compress history, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its aesthetic appropriation—is performed in female aesthetic production.

V.G. Julie Rajan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, U.S.A. Her publications include: The Phenomenon of Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (Routledge, forthcoming); Reading the “Exotic”: South Asia and Its Others (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming); Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008); and The Home and the World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006). Sanja Bahun-Radunović is Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, U.K. Her publications include: Modernism and Melancholia: History as Mourning-work (forthcoming); Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008); The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006); To Icarus, With Love (Prometej Publishers, 1998); and On the Atomic Bomb, Pain, Spaghetti, and the Rest (Promocija Publishers, 1994).

Definitions of myth that are period- and culture-specific argue that myths are eternal and unchanging, and such definitions often result in patriarchal epistemic violence being done to women. This volume of essays, which ranges across a number of world cultures, argues rather for a definition of myth that allows for poetic reinvention and transvaluation of mythic narratives in new generations and cultural imaginaries. Focusing on the contemporary feminist transformation of the mythic narratives of Cassandra, Medusa, Persephone and Demeter, Orpheus and Eurydice, the story of Beatrice Cenci, and Vietnamese traditional folk tales, the essays in this anthology demonstrate beautifully how contemporary women artists, in art, performance, and narrative, reconfigure mythic subtexts and challenge the structures of control inherent in them, to provide a feminist reflective gaze on the “landscape of myth.”

—Professor Janet A. Walker, Rutgers University

"Rajan and Bahun assemble a series of new explorations of the roles of women as actors in, interpreters for and rewriters of mythology. From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production presents explorations in writing and art that interrogate the power relationships between the female archetypes that are represented in both traditional and rewritten texts and the readers, observers and consumers of those mythic representations. Addressing a diverse range of mythical systems and cross-pollinated engagements, this anthology gives voice to some of the most urgent and current interpretations."

—Dr. Helen Asquine Fazio, HA Fazio Associates

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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