Experience an insider's view into a poignant collection of personal expressions & reflections created and assembled from over an entire lifetime. o Imagine having the opportunity to truly remember how you saw the world and felt over 4 decades. o Picture, in your own handwriting, personal notes to remind you of those quiet thoughts, hopes and fears that led you to be the person you are today; or, o Envision how your personal perspectives would have changed, matured or evolved over those years. Imagine what you might find... What changed... and, what had not!
RJ and Hannah daringly and uniquely collaborate to unify their individual, sensitive views of life's journey and experiences into a singular view of expression. They remain two souls, each seeking to amplify and bear witness to the natural beauty contained within and around them. However, their collaborative effort results in a mosaic of artistic fusion that is expressed uniquely throughout their book. Dual forms (photography and words) work in harmony sight and sound uniquely, intricately balanced.
In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science. Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War. Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans “of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece” and the Pope’s “bless’d beads”, to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.
Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
This collection of essays examines the history of urban leisure cultures in Europe in the transition from the early modern to the modern period. The volume brings together research on a wide variety of leisure activities which are usually studied in isolation, from theatre and music culture, art exhibitions, spas and seaside resorts to sports and games, walking and cafes and restaurants. The book develops a new research agenda for the history of leisure by focusing on the complex processes of cultural transfer that were fundamental in transforming urban leisure culture from the British Isles to France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Austria and the Ottoman Empire. How did new models of organising and experiencing urban leisure pastimes 'travel' from one European region to another? Who were the main agents of cultural innovation and appropriation? How did entrepreneurs, citizens and urban authorities mediate and adapt foreign influences to local contexts? How did the increasingly 'entangled' character of European urban leisure culture impact upon the ways men and women from various classes identified with their social, cultural or (proto)national communities? Accessible and wide-ranging, this volume offers students and scholars a broad overview of the history of urban leisure culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The agenda-setting focus on transnational cultural transfer will stimulate new questions and contribute to a more integrated study of the rise of modern urban culture.
