Shaggy Beard wishes to take me to wife! What a monstrous joke. That dog assassin whose breath smells like the mouth of Hell, who makes wind like others make music, who is so ugly and old! Catherine's in trouble. Caught between a mother who is determined to turn her into the perfect medieval lady and a father who wants her to marry her off to much older and utterly repulsive suitor. Luckily, Catherine has a plan. She has experience outwitting suitors and is ready to take matters into her own hands. A fun and vibrant coming-of-age novel about a 14-year-old girl's fight for freedom and right to self-determination.
Book 2 of Tales of London. Eighteen-year-old Catherine Rayborn is thrilled with her first taste of independence when she begins Girton College in Cambridge in 1880. Amid all the excitement, however, comes the painful realization of the vast difference between true love and shallow infatuation. Lawana Blackwell skillfully endears a cast of loveable characters to readers in a story that will linger long after the last page is turned.
Catherine, a strong-willed, independent, middle-aged woman with two sons--one in high school, one just off to college--has enjoyed an on-again, off-again love affair for many years with Harry.
Empress Catherine II produced a body of written material so vast and diverse that it seems impossible to provide a general characterization of the works contained in the authoritative twelve-volume collection assembled by A. N. Pypin from handwritten source material. This book does not attempt an all-embracing review of Catherine’s entire literary output, which consists of works in multiple genres and languages. The Russian empress’s writings have been the repeated subject of serious analysis for nineteenth- and twentieth-century researchers; all of these in one way or another demonstrate that across a variety of genres and formats, with a greater or lesser degree of independence and originality, the literary works of Catherine II always express her politics and ideology. These texts were carefully prepared, their publications and stage productions executed magnificently. As a rule, the most significant works were translated into French, German, and, in some cases, English. European readers, as well as the Russian public, were expected to be attentive witnesses to, and happy consumers of, the monarch’s compositions. Amongst rulers, the literary productivity of the Russian empress has no analogue in history. This volume is the first study in English of the vast literary output of Catherine the Great.
This highly original study provides a detailed analysis of Catherine the Great's celebrity avant la lettre and how gender, power, and scandal made it commercially successful. In 1762, when Catherine II overthrew her husband to seize the throne of the Russian Empire, her instant popular fame in regions of Europe far from her own domains fit the still new discourse of modern celebrity and soon helped shape it. Catherine the Great and Celebrity Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe shows that over the next 35 years Catherine was part of a standard troika of celebrity-making agents-intriguing central figure, large-scale media, and an engaged public. Ruth P. Dawson reveals how writers, print makers, newspaper editors, playwrights, and more-the 18th-century's media workers-laboured to produce marketable representations of the empress, and audiences of non-elite readers, viewers, and listeners savoured the resulting commodities. This book presents long neglected material evidence of the tsarina's fantasy-inducing fame, examines the 1762 coup as the indispensable story that first constructed her distant public image, and explains how the themes of enlightenment, luxury consumption, clashing gender roles, and exotic Russia continued to attract non-elite fans and anti-fans during the middle decades of her reign. For the later years, the book considers the scrutiny inspired by the French Revolution and Catherine's skewering in unsparing misogynist cartoons as they applied to visual representations, her achievements as ruler, the long-ago overthrow of her husband, and her gradually revealed list of lovers. Dawson reflects on Catherine II's demise in 1796 and how this instigated a final burst of adoration, loathing, and ambivalence as new accounts of her life, both real and fictional, claimed to unwrap the final secrets of the first modern international female celebrity – even now the only woman in history widely known as 'the Great'.
THERE have been better women than Catherine of Russia, nobler and more learned women, but history discloses no woman who combined so much of good and evil into one bewildering and gloriously successful career. Daughter of a petty German Prince, chance made her the wife of the heir to the Russian Empire. She took that nation to her heart, discarded her weakling husband, and ruled her adopted country for more than three decades with a strength and understanding it had seldom known before. No one rejoiced at the birth of Catherine. Her parents had prayed for a boy, and the little girl was soon made to feel the bitterness of their disappointment. She decided, therefore, to become a man and, when the opportunity appeared, she decide to become the greatest man in Europe. Nothing stood in the way of that determination—Catherine was quite prepared to commit murder when the occasion called for it—but she was not cruel according to the standards of her day. She was kind, open-handed; her sympathetic interest in her people was deep; and she became noted for her acts of spontaneous generosity. Gina Kaus seizes the material which this unique life affords, remolds it in the light of newly discovered documents and modern psychology, and presents for the first time a unified and congruous portrait of Catherine. The spectacular occurrences of the Empress’s reign appear here in their relative significance to her life and to European history. Catherine fulfilled the dream of her girlhood and, as Frau Kaus remarks, she died the happiest death that ever Tsar died—she died of laughter.
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no formal education, and her accomplishments were considered miracles rather than the work of her own hand. As a result, she has been largely excluded from accounts of the development of European humanism and the language and literature of Italy. Reclaiming Catherine ofSiena makes the case for considering Catherine alongside literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, as it underscores Catherine's commitment to using the vernacular to manifest Christ's message—and her own. Jane Tylus charts here the contested struggles of scholars over the centuries to situate Catherine in the history of Italian culture in early modernity. But she mainly focuses on Catherine’s works, calling attention to the interplay between orality and textuality in the letters and demonstrating why it was so important for Catherine to envision herself as a writer. Tylus argues for a reevalution of Catherine as not just a medieval saint, but one of the major figures at the birth of the Italian literary canon.
One of the most colorful characters in modern history, Catherine II of Russia began her life as a minor German princess, until the childless Empress Elizabeth and Catherine's own scheming mother married her off to the Grand Duke Peter of Russia at age sixteen. By thirty-three, she had overthrown her husband in a bloodless coup and established herself as Empress of the multinational Russian Empire, the largest territorial political unit in modern history. Portrayed both as a political genius who restored to Russia the glory it had known in the days of Peter the Great and as a despotic foreign adventuress who usurped the Russian throne, murdered her rivals, and tyrannized her subjects, she was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. Catherine the Great, the first popular biography of the empress based on contemporary scholarship, provides a vivid portrait of Catherine as a mother, a lover, and, above all, an extremely savvy ruler. Concentrating on her long reign (1762-96), John Alexander examines all aspects of Catherine's life and career: the brilliant political strategies by which she won the acceptance of a nationalistic elite; her expansive foreign policy; the domestic reforms with which she revamped the Russian military, political structure, and economy; and, of course, her infamous love life. Beginning with an account of the dramatic palace revolt by which Catherine unseated her husband and a background chapter describing the circumstances of her early childhood and marriage, Alexander then proceeds chronologically through the thirty-four years of her reign. Presenting Catherine in more human terms than previous biographers have, Alexander includes numerous quotations from her reminiscences and notes. We learn, for instance, not only the names and number of her lovers, but her understanding of what many considered a shocking licentiousness. "The trouble is," she wrote, "that my heart would not willingly remain one hour without love." The result of twenty years' research by one of America's leading narrative historians of modern Russia, this truly impressive work offers a much-needed, balanced reappraisal of one of history's most scandal-ridden figures.
