List of fictional prostitutes and courtesans  

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Olympia (detail) by Édouard Manet was a succès de scandale when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. Today, it is considered as the start of modern art.
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Olympia (detail) by Édouard Manet was a succès de scandale when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865. Today, it is considered as the start of modern art.

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prostitute, courtesans

This is a list of fictional characters.

Contents

In fiction and literature

prostitutes in art and literature

The first depiction of fictional prostitutes is to be found in the Dialogues of the Heterae by Lucian.

Pietro Aretino, an Italian Renaissance writer, wrote a series of dialogues (Capricciosi ragionamenti) in which a mother teaches her daughter what options are available to women and how to be an effective courtesan. The French novelist Balzac wrote about a courtesan in his Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–47). Emile Zola likewise wrote a novel, Nana (1880), about a courtesan in nineteenth-century France.

  • The Woman of the Camilias was a novel about a courtesan by French author Alexandre Dumas, fils that was turned into the opera La Traviata by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. In the opera, the courtesan's name is "Violetta". "La Traviata" in Italian translates "The Wayward One".
  • Satine played by Nicole Kidman, an actress/courtesan who falls in love with a penniless poet/writer played by Ewan McGregor, in the movie Moulin Rouge!.
  • The movie Dangerous Beauty, starring Catherine McCormack, tells the story of Veronica Franco, a Venetian courtesan.
  • Nana, in Emile Zola's famous novel of 1880 should count as a courtesan
  • In Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan, Fiammetta Bianchini, a renowned courtesan of Rome, and her sharp-witted dwarf rise to success among the intrigue and secrets of Renaissance Venice.
  • In John Cleland's Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny goes from poor orphaned country girl to wealthy skilled courtesan eventually finding her one true love and retiring to marriage. Her history is told in the first person through several letters to friends detailing her life as a courtesan.
  • Gigi is a 1944 novel by the French writer Colette about a wealthy cultured man of fashion who discovers he is in love with a young Parisian girl being groomed for a career as a grande cocotte and eventually marries her.

List of fictional prostitutes

Symbolic or allegorical prostitutes

Mythical prostitutes

  • Agatha - English prostitute, mother of Mother Shipton
  • Basileia (Greek) In Pandemos, this goddess was mainly a goddess to prostitutes or courtesans.
  • Bebhinn (British isles) Goddess of Pleasure
  • Belili (Sumer, Babylon, Assyrian, Philistine, Canaanites) sacred prostitution
  • The daughters in the Saint Nicolas legend (Asia Minor) - They were sold to a brothel by their father.
  • Naamah - (Hebrew) an angel of prostitution, one of the succubus mates of the demon Samael in Zoharistic Qabalah
  • Shamhat (Sumer/Babylon)
  • Xochiquetzal (Aztec) goddess of prostitutes, pregnant women, dancing


See also





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