Up for an atomic saga? But first, if little atoms could only talk, just think of the stories they could tell us about our planet and universe. This is a voyage of discovery on a celestial and planetary scale. Seven lovely little atoms are born in the Oort Cloud. They are thrown into a beautiful blue-water planet and are split up. They soon find that this water planet is the best atomic amusement park ever. They will meet and be hosted by many simple and complex life forms. They will suffer through earthquakes, asteroid strikes, thunderstorms, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. They will see the best and worst of an emerging mankind. None of them will suffer, and all will have the fun of many lifetimes.
She argues that the historical realignment of the categories of class, kinship, and representation that took place with the shift from patriarchal to egalitarian models of familial order marked a transformative moment in the cultural construction of incest.
History has not been kind to Hannah More. This once lionized writer and activist—the most influential female philanthropist of her day—is now considered by many to be the embodiment of pious morality and reactionary anti-feminism. Largely because of her belief in separate spheres for men and women, More has been vilified by modern-day feminists. The first biography to examine the complete range of her life and work, The World of Hannah More depicts the author as a forceful voice in her own day and one who, from the point of view of plain justice, today deserves a more nuanced treatment. Without denying the problems More presents for modern readers, Patricia Demers has produced a balanced revisionist study of a woman enormously influential in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century England. By examining the career of this cultural warrior, situating her major texts in relation to contemporaries, and addressing her published writing, philanthropic activities, and voluminous correspondence, Demers anchors The World of Hannah More in the work itself—an appropriate and just response to a woman who took pride in living to some purpose. Trying to deal justly with More and her female moral imperialism requires admitting both the expansiveness and the limitations of her charity, methodology and vision. Without venerating or trivializing, Demers pursues the doubleness and contradictions of More's largely neglected or superficially mined works, from the determined experiments of the earliest plays to the poignantly revealing essays on practical piety, Christian morals, and Saint Paul.
Daughters of the King explores women's involvement in and around the synagogue from its antecedents in the bibical period to contemporary times. The contributors to the book, including Susan Grossman, Rivka Haut, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Judith Hauptman, Paula Hyman, and others, represent an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, drawing from history, anthropology, sociology, women's studies, Jewish law, the Bible, and rabbinic thought.
Presented for the first time in a critical English edition, Urania: A Romance provides modern readers with a rare glimpse into the novel and novella forms at a time when narrative genres were not only being invented but, in the hands of women like Giulia Bigolina (1518?-1569?), used as vehicles for literary experimentation. The first known prose romance written by a woman in Italian, Bigolina's Urania centers on the monomaniacal love of a female character falling into melancholy when her beloved leaves her for a more beautiful woman. A tale that includes many of the conventions that would later become standards of the genre—cross-dressing, travel, epic skirmishes, and daring deeds—Urania also contains the earliest treatise on the worth of women. Also included in this volume, the novella Giulia Camposampiero is the only extant part of a probable longer narrative written in the style of the Decameron. While employing some of those same gender and role reversals as Urania, including the privileging of heroic constancy in both men and women, it chronicles the tribulations that a couple undergoes until their secret marriage is publicly recognized.
Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1587-1653) wrote the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman, one of the first plays by a woman, and the first published work of fiction by an Englishwoman. Yet, despite her status as a member of the distinguished Sidney family, Wroth met with disgrace at court for her authorship of a prose romance, which was adjudged an inappropriate endeavor for a woman and was forcibly withdrawn from publication. Only recently has recognition of Wroth's historical and literary importance been signaled by the publication of the first modern edition of her romance, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania. Naomi Miller offers an illuminating study of this significant early modern woman writer. Using multiple critical/theoretical perspectives, including French feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, she examines gender in Wroth's time. Moving beyond the emphasis on victimization that shaped many previous studies, she considers the range of strategies devised by women writers of the period to establish voices for themselves. Where previous critics have viewed Wroth primarily in relation to her male literary predecessors in the Sidney family, Miller explores Wroth's engagement with a variety of discourses, reading her in relation to a broad range of English and continental authors, both male and female, from Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare to Aemilia Lanier, Elizabeth Cary, and Marguerite de Navarre. She also contextualizes Wroth's writing in relation to a variety of nonliterary texts of the period, both political and domestic. Thanks to Miller's sensitive readings, Wroth's writings provide a lens through which to view gender relations in the early modern period.
Making a case for the importance of mentoring in the eighteenth century, particularly in expanding print culture, this collection employs a variety of critical and methodological approaches reflective of the diversity of the mentoring experiences. Authors considered include John Wilmot the Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Carter, and Samuel Johnson.
