{"product_id":"the-beauty-of-choice-on-women-art-and-freedom-9780231215268","title":"The Beauty of Choice: On Women, Art, and Freedom","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Beauty of Choice\u003c\/i\u003e, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women's taste as the engine of liberal values. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSteiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer's \"The Wife of Bath's Tale,\" she presents women's sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature--expressions of their taste--and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Beauty of Choice\u003c\/i\u003e pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shōnagon's defense of pleasure in the \u003ci\u003ePillow Book\u003c\/i\u003e; Picasso's and Balthus's sexualization of their models; the redefinition of \"waste\" in postmodern fiction; and interactivity and empathy in the works of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Barbara MacCallum, Kristin Beeler, and Hannah Gadsby. It offers the first critical study of \u003ci\u003eHeroines\u003c\/i\u003e, a memorial to the twenty thousand women raped in Kosovo during the Serbian genocide. This deeply original book gives taste, beauty, and pleasure central roles in a passionate defense of women's freedom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania as well as an opera librettist and multimedia artist. Her many acclaimed books include \u003ci\u003eThe Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism\u003c\/i\u003e (1995) and \u003ci\u003eVenus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art\u003c\/i\u003e (2001).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Columbia University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50892349964562,"sku":"9780231215268","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_920d9977-f8a8-4288-aaf8-c552df5a8ef3.jpg?v=1738187839","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-beauty-of-choice-on-women-art-and-freedom-9780231215268","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}