BiblioVault - Books about Benstock, Shari

Footnotes

On Shoes

Benstock, Shari

Rutgers University Press, 2002

A lively exploration of the cultural significance of shoes.

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No Gifts from Chance

A Biography of Edith Wharton

By Shari Benstock

University of Texas Press, 2004

The first new biography of America's foremost woman of letters in twenty years, No Gifts from Chance presents an Edith Wharton for our times. Far from the emotionally withdrawn and neurasthenic victim of earlier portraits, she is revealed here as an ambitious, disciplined, and self-determined woman who fashioned life to her own desires. Drawing on government records, legal and medical documents, and recently opened collections of Wharton's letters, Shari Benstock's biography offers new information on what have been called the key mysteries of her life: the question of her paternity, her troubled relations with her mother and older brothers, her marriage to manic-depressive Teddy Wharton, and her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton.

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On Fashion

Benstock, Shari

Rutgers University Press, 1994

Until recently, fashion was considered the "F-word" in intellectual circles, dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. Yet no area of life, no individual moment, stands outside fashion's discourses. Intuitively, we all know that clothing is a language, incessantly communicating messages about its wearer. But who speaks this language, to whom is it addressed, what does it mean, and how are its meanings established and transformed? On Fashion explores the ways our material, political, psychological, sexual, even intellectual lives are woven into fashion's fabric.

This stimulating collection of essays explores fashion's symbolic and figurative functions in photography, cinema, and video; in consumerism, postmodernism, and feminism; in political and material culture; and in self-definition and subjectivity. They demonstrate the pervasive reach of fashion and its expressions.

This collection contains over sixty photographs and illustrations and includes essays by Barbara Brodman, Mary Ann Caws, Linda Benn DeLibero, Hlne Cixous, Diana Fuss, Cheryl Herr, Karla Jay, Deborah Jenson, Douglas Kellner, Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, Leslie W. Rabine, Andrew Ross, Sonia Rykiel, Carol Shloss, Kaja Silverman, Maureen Turim, and Iris Marion Young.

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Women of the Left Bank

Paris, 1900-1940

By Shari Benstock

University of Texas Press, 1986

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.

This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."

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