This fiction is set in Nedumanoor, in south Kerala, an imaginary village. The time scale of the story spans from the 1930’s to the next millennium with three generations in focus. Kunj, a school dropout was deeply in love with a beautiful girl, Marria. However, Marria was not smitten by him. Read how Kunj managed to marry her and from then on how Marria became a “living dowry” for his family. Several people and social factors controlled how life proceeded for Marria in that society. The story has exploitation of women, skewed romances, a wrestling match, marriage brokering, school teachers, Church pastors, and so on. All these are woven to make an interesting reading and an insight into the rural life that once existed in Kerala, the state which has the sobriquet “God’s own country”. Do these happen even today? It is for the readers’ to judge.
In Living under the Evil Pope, Martina Mampieri presents the Hebrew Chronicle of Pope Paul IV, written in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Italian Jewish moneylender Benjamin Neḥemiah ben Elnathan (alias Guglielmo di Diodato) from Civitanova Marche.
Praise for the first edition: 'It is difficult to imagine another book in which one could find all this diverse material, and no doubt Amt's collection, in its richness, and in its genuine clarity and simplicity will takes prominent place in our expanded, diversified medieval curriculum, a curriculum that takes class, gender, and ethnicity as central to an understanding of world cultural history.' - The Medieval Review Long considered to be a definitive and truly groundbreaking collection of sources, Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe uniquely presents the everyday lives and experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This indispensible text has now been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect new research, and includes previously unavailable source material. This new edition includes expanded sections on marriage and sexuality, and on peasant women and townswomen, as well as a new section on women and the law. There are brief introductions both to the period and to the individual documents, study questions to accompany each reading, a glossary of terms and a fully updated bibliography. Working within a multi-cultural framework, the book focuses not just on the Christian majority, but also present material about women in minority groups in Europe, such as Jews, Muslims, and those considered to be heretics. Incorporating both the laws, regulations and religious texts that shaped the way women lived their lives, and personal narratives by and about medieval women, the book is unique in examining women’s lives through the lens of daily activities, and in doing so as far as possible through the voices of women themselves.
"A wife brought, sold and married with the stroke of writer's ink. A young woman quietly changes society's rules and thwarts a theft by marriage of her family's estate. Greed turns to murder. All takes a stand to take the Dowry. Who will survive to possess the Dowry?
"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books to read in August The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award–winner Edward Ball Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail. Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by “our Klansman” and his comrades, and shares their stories. For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished. In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball’s family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.
The aim of the bookis to unwind the problems, tensions, adjustments and expections of educated working class of women and present genuine suggestive measures to make the family more comfortable and meaningful.
This title was first published in 2003. "Jonsonians" explores the theatrical traditions within which Ben Jonson was working, investigates the ways in which his work has influenced and informed the development of theatre from the early 17th century to the present day, and examines Jonson's theatre in relation to 20th- and 21st-century traditions of performance. It argues that although Jonsonian traditions are rarely acknowledged, they are vibrant and powerful forces that are very much alive today in the theatre of writers and directors as diverse as Caryl Churchill, David Mamet, Spike Lee, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Peter Barnes. The book opens with essays on "Poetaster", "Sejanus", "Bartholomew Fair", "The New Inn" and "The Magnetic Lady" - each of which interrogates, in a variety of ways, the notion of "Jonsonian" theatre and considers the relationships of Jonson's theatre to classical traditions, to his contemporaries in England and Europe, and to modern performance practice and theory. The second section of the book includes essays on "The Sons of Ben" (including Richard Brome) Aphra Behn and "Daughters of Ben" (women working in the theatre in the post-Restoration period). The book concludes with an extensive section devoted to modern day Jonsonians, exploring how reading their work as Jonsonian might alter perceptions of contemporary theatre, and how seeing them as contemporary "Jonsonians" might affect our understanding of Jonson's theatre.
