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Is The Marriage of Figaro just about Figaro? Is Don Giovanni's story the only one-or even the most interesting one-in the opera that bears his name? For generations of critics, historians, and directors, it's Mozart's men who have mattered most. Too often, the female characters have been understood from the male protagonist's point of view or simply reduced on stage (and in print) to paper cutouts from the age of the powdered wig and the tightly cinched corset. It's time to give Mozart's women-and Mozart's multi-dimensional portrayals of feminine character-their due. In this lively book, Kristi Brown-Montesano offers a detailed exploration of the female roles in Mozart's four most frequently performed operas, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte. Each chapter takes a close look at the music, libretto text, literary sources, and historical factors that give shape to a character, re-evaluating common assumptions and proposing fresh interpretations.Brown-Montesano views each character as the subject of a story, not merely the object of a hero's narrative or the stock figure of convention. From amiable Zerlina, to the awesome Queen of the Night, to calculating Despina, all of Mozart's women have something unique to say. These readings also tackle provocative social, political, and cultural issues, which are used in the operas to define positive and negative images of femininity: revenge, power, seduction, resistance, autonomy, sacrifice, faithfulness, class, maternity, and sisterhood. Keenly aware of the historical gap between the origins of these works and contemporary culture, Brown-Montesano discusses how attitudes about such concepts-past and current-influence our appreciation of these fascinating representations of women.

Operas --- Women in opera. --- Opera --- Opera characters --- Operatic characters --- Characters. --- Characters --- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, --- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus --- academia. --- academic studies. --- class in opera. --- cosi fan tutte. --- die zauberflote. --- don giovanni. --- famous opera. --- femininity. --- feminism in classical music. --- feminist studies. --- heros narrative. --- historical gap. --- le nozze di gargo. --- libretto text. --- literary analysis. --- male protagonist. --- marriage of figaro. --- maternity. --- men who wrote women well. --- mozart and women. --- multi-dimensional female characters. --- music appreciation. --- music history. --- political issues within opera. --- provocative social issues. --- sisterhood.

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'Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints provides a politically urgent critical approach to disability and female corporeality in early modern Spanish literary and social discourse. Rigorous in its historical contextualization and offering innovative, compelling readings of classic works, this book challenges familiar interpretations of women's bodies in texts of this period, transforming prior disciplinary boundaries and categories of analysis.' Professor Susan Antebi, University of Toronto 'Blending historical context and literary text with disability studies method, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros sets out to challenge the foundations of early modern scholarship through a long-awaited critical feminist examination of disability as both a social construction and an embodied material experience.' Benjamin Fraser, Professor and Chair, Thomas Harriot College of Arts & Sciences, East Carolina University Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women's disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that paradoxically, femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths.

Spanish literature --- Women with disabilities in literature. --- Women in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Woman (Christian theology) in literature --- Women in drama --- Women in poetry --- Physically handicapped women in literature --- Sex role in literature. --- Literature --- Literary Theory --- Literature History and Criticism --- Fiction --- Novelists and Prose Writers --- Literary Studies - c 1500 to c 1800 --- Hispanic and Latino Studies --- Spain --- Modern Period --- Women's Bodies --- Disability --- Spanish medical discourses --- monstrous mother --- Feminist disability --- deviance --- Early modern Spanish literature --- Celestina --- Lozana andaluza --- deviant female characters --- disability theory --- Syphilis --- procuresses --- Early modern female corporality --- Quevedo --- midwives --- Cervantes --- Teresa de Avila --- Aging