Download Free Androgyny Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Androgyny and write the review.

Androgyny in Modern Literature engages with the ways in which the trope of androgyny has shifted during the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Alchemical, platonic, sexological, psychological and decadent representations of androgyny have provided writers with an icon which has been appropriated in diverse ways. This fascinating new study traces different revisions of the psycho-sexual, embodied, cultural and feminist fantasies and repudiations of this unstable but enduring trope across a broad range of writers from the fin de siècle to the present.
Analysis of sexual ambivalence in antiquity, which was both deeply threatening to the social order and profoundly attractive.
Full of psychological and spiritual insights that speak to today's sexual confusion. Singer shows how a person can at once embrace complementary and contradictory attitudes toward sex and gender. Finally, she proposes a range of choices by which people can identify themselves, secure that the masculine/feminine interaction within each individual is not only normal, but the dynamic factor in their wholeness.
"A frank, passionate plea for us to move away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen. . . . An interesting, lively and valuable general introduction to a new way of perceiving our Western cultural tradition, with emphasis upon English literature." --Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review
This book traces the long and complex history of the androgyne throughout Western aesthetics, philosophy, mythology and literature, from Plato to contemporary feminist theory, with particular attention given to the Romantic period. It notes that from the classical vision of the androgyne as a symbol of primordial totality and oneness created out of a union of opposed forces to Freud's theory of the libido, the figure has functioned as a conservative, even a misogynistic, ideal. Kari Weil shows that, rather than being a synthesis of male and female, the androgyne has been a construction of patriarchal ideology that has served to establish sexual, aesthetic and racial hierarchies.
To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny confronts the entrenched mystique surrounding the hard drinker, bullfighter, and creator of characters steeled by their own code. Spilka stresses Hemingway's lifelong dependence on and secret identification with women, and in doing so shatters the myths of male bonding and heroic lives of "men without women." He develops the biographical, literary, and cultural implications of Hemingway's lifelong quarrel with androgyny to reveal a more psychologically complex man and writer than the mystique has allowed.
This book studies and articulates the emergence from the poetical subtext of six major English romantics of "the androgynous sublime", a mode that conflates the motif of psychic androgyny (traceable as far back as the Book of Genesis and Plato's Symposium) with the mode of sublimity, first discussed by Longinus and much debated from the eighteenth century onward. Frequently echoed by the romantic poets, Milton's description of the Holy Spirit's role in the creation of the world is androgynous. Since humane creativity mirrors divine creativity, it follows that the artist qua artist muct also be androgynous - that is, endowed with what Lyrical Ballads, calls "a more comprehensive soul" than is "supposed to be common among mankind". Characterized by a flexuous, limber style and an association with androgynous subject matter, the androgynous sublime subverts conventional notions of sublimity while offering a more comprehensive model with which to supplement, of non supplant, them. The methodology of this study is to present a "counter-deconstructive" reading of the text and, where applicable, designs of Blake, as well as the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, seen from this somewhat novel but not ignoble perspective.
In the late nineteenth century, as changing cultural representations of gender roles and categories made differences between men and women increasingly difficult to define, theorists such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud began to postulate a third, androgynous sex. For many modern artists, this challenge to familiar hierarchies of gender represented a crisis in artistic authority. Faced with the failure of the romantic muse and other two-sex tropes for the imagination, James Joyce, H. D., William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist writers of both sexes became attracted to a culturally specific notion of an androgynous imagination. In The Modern Androgyne Imagination, Lisa Rado explores the dynamic process through which these writers filled the imaginative space left by the departed muse. For Joyce, the androgynous imagination meant experimenting with the idea of a "new womanly man." H. D. personified her "overmind" as the androgynous Ray Bart. Faulkner supplanted the muse with the hermaphrodite. And Woolf became a kind of psychic transsexual. Although they selected these particular tropes for different reasons, literary men and women shared the desire to embody perceived strengths of both sexes and to transcend sexual and artistic limitation altogether. However, courting this androgynous imagination was a risky act. It often evoked the dynamics, even the specific vocabulary, of the sublime, which Rado characterizes as a perilous confrontation with and attempted identification between self and the transcendent other--that powerful, androgynous creative mind--through which they hoped to generate authority and find inspiration. This empowerment toward which Joyce, H. D., Faulkner, and Woolf gesture in texts such as Ulysses, HERmione, The Sound and the Fury, and Orlando is rarely achieved. Joyce and Faulkner were unable to silence their fears of feminization and the female body, while H. D. and Woolf remained troubled by the threat of ego incorporation and self-erasure that the androgynous model of the imagination portends. Still, their pursuit of new imaginative tropes yields important insights into the work of these writers and of literary modernism.
The first visually led exploration of androgyny—from representations in antiquity to its current prevalence in the fashion world and beyond In January 2011, Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture runway show ended with the image of a willowy blonde bride in a diaphanous gown. The bride was a man, and one of the first models to walk for both men’s and women’s collections. The event marked the start of a trend. “This ad is gender neutral,” proclaimed a 2016 poster for the fashion brand Diesel; “I resist definitions,” announced a Calvin Klein ad in the same year, while a Louis Vuitton shoot featured Jaden Smith wearing a skirt. The art of Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau, the writings of Oscar Wilde, and the mystic Joséphin Péladan prove that the turn of the previous century was as compelled by androgyny as this one. From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, the genders have blended: from Berlin in the 1920s to Hollywood of the 1930s with Garbo and Dietrich; from the 1940s Bright Young Things to the androgynous pop stars of the 1970s, and beyond. Patrick Mauries presents a cultural history of androgyny—accompanied by a striking selection of more than 120 images, from nineteenth-century painting to contemporary fashion photography—drawing on the worlds of art and literature to give us a deeper understanding of the strange but timeless human drive to escape from defined categories.