It was customary for the wife of a nobleman in eighteenth-century Spain to be courted fervently and seemingly forever, by a man who was not her husband. This liaison, accepted and even encouraged by the husband, was presumably platonic, though that may not always have been the case. It was carried on according to a complex, if ambiguous, code of companionship and whispered conversation. With the help of a lively blend of archival documents and literary sources, Carmen Martín Gaite admits us to the intricacies of the code and unravels its significance for the women who enjoyed the attention of a cortejo, or escort. Why was the cortejo tolerated, by society and by the woman's aristocratic family, even though it infringed traditional religious precepts? What did woman and her friend talk about at such length? Was their flirtation intellectual, reflecting the effects of Enlightenment rationalism on Spanish culture? Letters, memoirs, and travel journals as well as dramatic works of the period offer invaluable clues to the nature of these relationships, in which the woman was almost ritually adored and placed on a pedestal. The conversation, we learn, was generally frivolous, focusing on possessions and luxuries in a way that clearly signals economic change and the dawn of a material age. At the same time, the cortejo did represent a taste of symbolic liberation for women whose social lives were rigidly constrained. Clarifying details from a great variety of historical sources are presented with the urgency and fluidity of a novel in this excellent English translation -- Book jacket.
The insightful essays in this book shine a new light on the roles of women within criminal networks, roles that in reality are often less traditional than researchers used to think. The book seeks to answer questions from a wide range of academic disciplines and traces the portrait of women tied to organized crime in Italy and around the world. The book offers up accounts of mafia women, and also tales of severe abuse and violence against women.
Formations of Modernity is a major introductory textbook offering an account of the important historical processes, institutions and ideas that have shaped the development of modern societies. This challenging and innovative book 'maps' the evolution of those distinctive forms of political, economic, social and cultural life which characterize modern societies, from their origins in early modern Europe to the nineteenth century. It examines the roots of modern knowledge and the birth of the social sciences in the Enlightenment, and analyses the impact on the emerging identity of 'the West' of its encounters through exploration, trade, conquest and colonization, with 'other civilizations'. Designed as an introduction to modern societies and modern sociological analyses, this book is of value to students on a wide variety of social science courses in universities and colleges and also to readers with no prior knowledge of sociology. Selected readings from a broad range of classical writers (Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) and contemporary thinkers (Michael Mann, E.P. Thompson, Edward Said) are integrated in each chapter, together with student questions and exercises.
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.
The proceedings of ISCV'95, the successor to previous Workshops on Computer Vision, comprise 104 refereed papers on topics in optical flow, matching/stereo, motion, object recognition, low-level vision, CAD-based vision, stereo, deformable models, systems and applications, tracking, segmentation and grouping, active vision, aerial image analysis, and integration/texture. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This peer-reviewed World Literature I anthology includes introductory text and images before each series of readings. Sections of the text are divided by time period in three parts: the Ancient World, Middle Ages and Renaissance, and then divided into chapters by location. World Literature I and the Compact Anthology of World Literature are similar in format and both intended for World Literature I courses, but these two texts are developed around different curricula.