Scandalous Liaisons
Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Italian Novella
By (author) Karina Feliciano Attar
Hardback (Published)
(October 2018)
ISBN: 9782503532851
Price: $108.00
On back order
Scandalous Liaisons offers an extensive, historicized study of the treatment of cross-cultural, interfaith, interethnic, and inter-class sex and romance in the Italian novella tradition. Penned by both major and minor novellisti, the tales examined graphically dramatize the breaching and policing of sexual contacts with strangers. In doing so, they reveal the social anxieties and cultural fantasies about the dangers to self-definition, group belonging, morality, and social order that such contacts were seen to represent. While they elaborate stereotypically misogynist and xenophobic notions that circulated in medieval and early modern Europe, each novella also presents ambiguous images of non-Christian identity, which calls into question neat equivalences between Christians and virtue, and non-Christians and vice. The author argues that such equivocal perspectives are, in part, products of the narrative crisscrossing of racial, religious, and cultural classifications with gender and social categories, and of the complex and changing dynamics of contemporary Mediterranean encounters between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Through interdisciplinary close readings, Scandalous Liaisons reveals that these novellas disclose profound reservations about who could and could not be assimilated into Christian Italian society, and implicitly ask their readers to consider the significance of race, religion, gender, and social class in determining questions of individual and collective identity.
Scandalous Liaisons offers an extensive, historicized study of the treatment of cross-cultural, interfaith, interethnic, and inter-class sex and romance in the Italian novella tradition. Penned by both major and minor novellisti, the tales examined graphically dramatize the breaching and policing of sexual contacts with strangers. In doing so, they reveal the social anxieties and cultural fantasies about the dangers to self-definition, group belonging, morality, and social order that such contacts were seen to represent. While they elaborate stereotypically misogynist and xenophobic notions that circulated in medieval and early modern Europe, each novella also presents ambiguous images of non-Christian identity, which calls into question neat equivalences between Christians and virtue, and non-Christians and vice. The author argues that such equivocal perspectives are, in part, products of the narrative crisscrossing of racial, religious, and cultural classifications with gender and social categories, and of the complex and changing dynamics of contemporary Mediterranean encounters between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Through interdisciplinary close readings, Scandalous Liaisons reveals that these novellas disclose profound reservations about who could and could not be assimilated into Christian Italian society, and implicitly ask their readers to consider the significance of race, religion, gender, and social class in determining questions of individual and collective identity.
- By (author) Karina Feliciano Attar
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