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The Female Nude

Art, Obscenity and Sexuality
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Brief Description
The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status? In a deft... Read More
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Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating as it was since its first publication. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author.

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The history of Western art is saturated with images of the female body. Lynda Nead's The Female Nude was the first book to critically examine this phenomenon from a feminist perspective and ask: how and why did the female nude acquire this status?

In a deft and engaging manner, Lynda Nead explores the ways in which acceptable and unacceptable images of the female body are produced, issues which have been reignited by current controversies around the patriarchy, objectification and pornography. Nead brilliantly illustrates the two opposing poles occupied by the female nude in the history of art; at one extreme the visual culmination of enlightenment aesthetics; at the other, spilling over into the degraded and the obscene. What both have in common, however, is the aim of containing the female body.

Drawing on examples of art and artists from the classical period to the 1980s, The Female Nude paints a devastating picture of the depiction of the female body and remains as fresh and invigorating today as it was at the time of its first publication.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author.

Series: Routledge Classics

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781032641782

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 01 May 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Routledge

Illustration: 40 Halftones, black and white; 40 Illustrations, black and white

Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Width: 138.0mm

Height: 216.0mm

Weight: 460g

Pages: 234

About the Author

Lynda Nead joined the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck in 1986 and was appointed to the Pevsner Chair of History of Art in 2004. Before coming to Birkbeck, she taught History of Art at the University of Leicester and the University of Kent. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Gresham College, London and Moore Distinguished Professor, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology. She was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2013 (MAE); a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2017 (FRHistS); and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018 (FBA).

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