Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In "Royal Representations," Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria's own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was felt.
Arguing that being, seeming, and appearing were crucial to Victoria's "rule," Homans explores the variability of Victoria's agency and of its representations using a wide array of literary, historical, and visual sources. Along the way she shows how Victoria provided a deeply equivocal model...

Medieval Douai was one of the wealthiest cloth towns of Flanders, and it left an enormous archive documenting the personal financial affairs of its citizens-wills, marriage agreements, business contracts, and records of court disputes over property rights of all kinds.

Based on extensive research in this archive, this book reveals how these documents were produced in a centuries-long effort to regulate-and ultimately to redefine-property and gender relations. At the center of the transformation was a shift from a marital property regime based on custom to one based on contract. In the...

In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen,...

Though letter writing is almost a lost art, twentieth-century writers have mimed the epistolary mode as a means of reevaluating the theme of love. In "Special Delivery," Linda S. Kauffman places the narrative treatment of love in historical context, showing how politics, economics, and commodity culture have shaped the meaning of desire.
Kauffman first considers male writers whose works, testing the boundaries of genre and gender, imitate love letters: Viktor Shklovsky's Zoo, Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," Roland Barthes's" A Lover's Discourse," and Jacques Derrida's "The Post Card." She...

In this informative and lively volume, Margaret L. King synthesizes a large body of literature on the condition of western European women in the Renaissance centuries (1350-1650), crafting a much-needed and unified overview of women's experience in Renaissance society.
Utilizing the perspectives of social, church, and intellectual history, King looks at women of all classes, in both usual and unusual settings. She first describes the familial roles filled by most women of the day as mothers, daughters, wives, widows, and workers. She turns then to that significant fraction of women in,...

At the heart of poetic tradition is a figure of abandonment, a woman forsaken and out of control. She appears in writings ancient and modern, in the East and the West, in high art and popular culture produced by women and by men. What accounts for her perennial fascination? What is her function "in" poems and "for" writers? Lawrence Lipking suggests many possibilities. In this figure he finds a partial record of women's experience, an instrument for the expression of religious love and yearning, a voice for psychological fears, and, finally, a model for the poet. Abandoned women inspire new...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was the first major woman poet in the English literary tradition. Her significance has been obscured in this century by her erasure from most literary histories and her exclusion from academic anthologies. Dorothy Mermin's critical and biographical study argues for Barrett Browning's originative role in both the Victorian poetic tradition and the development of women's literature.
Barrett Browning's place at the wellhead of a new female tradition remains the single most important fact about her in terms of literary history, and it was central to her...

By examining representations of women on stage and in the many printed materials aimed at them, Karen Newman shows how female subjectivity both the construction of the gendered subject and the ideology of women's subjection to men was fashioned in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Her emphasis is not on "women" so much as on the category of "femininity" as deployed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Through the critical lens of poststructuralism, Newman reads anatomies, conduct and domesticity handbooks, sermons, homilies, ballads, and court cases to delineate the...

"Africa Wo/Man Palava" offers the first close look at eight Nigerian women writers and proposes a new vernacular theory based on their work. Flora Nwapa, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Buchi Emecheta, Funmilayo Fakunle, Ifeoma Okoye, Zaynab Alkali, Eno Obong, and Simi Bedford are the writers Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi considers. African womanism, an emerging model of female discourse, is at the heart of their writing. In their work, female resistance shifts from the idea of "palava," or trouble, to a focus on consensus, compromise, and cooperation; it tackles sexism, totalitarianism, and ethnic prejudice....

In "Reign of Virtue, " Miranda Pollard explores the effects of military defeat and Nazi occupation on French articulations of gender in wartime France.
Drawing on governmental archives, historical texts, and propaganda, Pollard explores what most historians have ignored: the many ways in which Vichy's politicians used gendered images of work, family, and sexuality to restore and maintain political and social order. She argues that Vichy wanted to return France to an illustrious and largely mythical past of harmony, where citizens all knew their places and fulfilled their responsibilities,...