Background
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard was born on April 4, 1947 in New York City. Daughter of Walter and Annabelle (Reich) Bernard.
( Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attent...)
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691127263/?tag=2022091-20
(The Muslim practice of concealing women from the eyes of ...)
The Muslim practice of concealing women from the eyes of alien men tempted Europeans to extravagant projections of their own wishes and fears. This volume examines the art that resulted from the late 17th to the early 20th century, including travel writing, literature, painting and opera.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300083890/?tag=2022091-20
(Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long ca...)
Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long captured the imagination of the West. The Muslim practice of concealing the women of the household from the eyes of alien men tempted Europeans to extravagant projections of their own wishes and fears. This intriguing book examines the art that resulted. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century - including travel writing, literature, painting, and even opera - Ruth Bernard Yeazell demonstrates the surprising variety of expressions inspired by the harem of the Western imagination. The book provides both a rich account of changing perceptions of the harem and a demonstration of the tenacious persistence of myth and stereotype. Yeazell shows that Europe's hunger for facts about the harem combined repeatedly with the impulse to fantasize. Masculine erotic fantasies of the harem were reflected in the paintings of Ingres and Delacroix, the writings of de Sade, Byron and Loti, and the work of anonymous pornographers. Alternate representations portrayed the harem as a prison or a locus of freedom, a place of murderous rivalry or a home of loving sisterhood, a chamber of erotic licence or a nightmarish snare of frustration and ennui. And Montesquieu, Mozart and Charlotte Bronte among others explored in their art the opposition of the imaginary pleasures of the harem to the freely chosen union of a loving couple. In a nuanced reading of Ingres's 'Bain turc' and other works, Yeazell concludes that for some the appeal of the harem lay in the fantasy of eluding time and death. Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Chace Family Professor of English and director of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030019871X/?tag=2022091-20
( From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of t...)
From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, no figure was more central to debates in England about the relations between the sexes than that of the modest woman. Drawing on a wide range of narratives from the period, Ruth Bernard Yeazell analyzes the multiple and conflicting wishes that were covered by talk of "modesty" and explores some of the most striking uses of a modest heroine. Combining evidence from conduct books and ladies' magazines with the arguments of influential theorists like Hume, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft, this book begins by asking why writers were devoted to the anxious remaking of women's "nature" and to codifying rules for their porper behavior. Fictions of Modesty shows how the culture at once tried to regulate young women's desires and effectively opened up new possibilities of subjectivity and individual choice. Yeazell goes on to demonstrate that modest delaying actions inform a central tradition of English narrative. On the Continent, the English believed, the jeune fille went from the artificial innocence of the convent to an arranged marriage and adultery; the natural modesty of the Englishwoman, however, enabled her to choose her own mate and to marry both prudently and with affection. Rather than taking its narrative impetus from adultery, then, English fiction concentrated on courtship and the consciousness of the young woman choosing. After paired studies of Richardson's Pamela and Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (even Fanny Hill, Yeazell argues, is a modest English heroine at heart), Yeazell investigates what women novelists made of the virtues of modesty in works by Burney, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Gaskell. A speculative postscript briefly addresses the discourse of late nineteenth-century science in order to show how Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Havelock Ellis's psychology of sex replicate fictions of female modesty. While those who sought to codify modest behavior in previous centuries often appealed to Nature for support, our modern understanding of the natural, Yeazell suggests, owes something to the work of the novelists. Sharply reasoned and witty, Fictions of Modesty will appeal to all those interested in women's studies, the English novel, and the continuing history of relations between the sexes.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226950964/?tag=2022091-20
(Explores the 19th century's fascination with Dutch painti...)
Explores the 19th century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. This book shows how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FKY7DME/?tag=2022091-20
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard was born on April 4, 1947 in New York City. Daughter of Walter and Annabelle (Reich) Bernard.
Bachelor with high honors, Swarthmore College, 1967. Master of Philosophy, Yale University, 1970. Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 1971.
Assistant professor English Boston University, 1971-1974, University of California at Los Angeles, 1975-1977, associate professor, 1977-1980, professor, 1980-1991, Yale University, New Haven, since 1991, director graduate studies, 1993-1998, 2007, Chace family professor, since 1995, chair, 2000—2005.
( From the late seventeenth century to the beginning of t...)
(The Muslim practice of concealing women from the eyes of ...)
(Explores the 19th century's fascination with Dutch painti...)
(Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long ca...)
( Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attent...)
Director Lewis Walpole Library., since 1996. Fellow: Academy Arts and Scis. Member Modern Language Association (executive council 1985-1988), English Institute (supervising committee 1983-1986).
Married Stephen C. Yeazell, August 14, 1969 (divorced 1980).