In Female Beauty in Art, a series of essays examine the presence and role of female beauty in art, history and culture, and consider the ways in which beauty can function as a discourse of female identity. As a concept, female beauty is unique in that it can contain compelling imbrications of gender ideologies, images, relations, cultural constructions and modes of interaction between persons and the institutions that define their lives. Thus, female beauty can provide proliferating methods through which female identity is examined and analyzed. The book builds upon those ideas in a variety...