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.
Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition
List of Images
Introduction
Part 1: Theorizing the Female Nude
1. Framing the Female Body
2. A Discourse on the Naked and the Nude
3. A Study of Ideal Art
4. Aesthetics and the Female Nude
5. Obscenity and the Sublime
Part 2: Redrawing the Lines
6. ‘The Damaged Venus’
7. The Framework of Tradition
8. The Lessons of the Life Class
9. Art Criticism and Sexual Metaphor
10. Breaking Open the Boundaries
11. Redrawing the Lines
Part 3: Cultural Distinctions
12. Sacred Frontiers
13. Pure and Motivated Pleasure
14. Policing the Boundaries
15. Displaying the Female Body
16. Erotic Art: A Frame for Desire.
Bibliography
Index
Biography
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).
“... this is a book which will be universally welcomed ... clearly written and beautifully paced.” – Marcia Pointon, Times Higher Educational Supplement
