The human body, particularly the female body in the nineteenth century, is central to Western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical.

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Author

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date January 1990 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780521385282

EISBN 9780300272024

Illustrations 48

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

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