In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how in these debates French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War.
In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings...

Until now, Orientalist art--exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars--has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. "Orientalism's Interlocutors" contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. Focusing on paintings and other representations of North African and Ottoman cultures, by both local artists and westerners, the contributors contend that the...

Edges of Empire is a timely reassessment of the history and legacy of Orientalist art and visual culture through its focus on the intersection between modernization, modernism and Orientalism.

• Covers indigenous art and agency, contemporary practices of collection and display, and a survey of key Orientalist tropes
  
• Contains original essays on new perspectives for scholars and students of art history, architecture, museum studies and cultural and postcolonial studies
  
• Highlights contested identities and new definitions of self through topics...

In Istanbul Exchanges, Mary Roberts offers an innovative way of understanding Orientalism by shifting the focus from Europe to Istanbul and examining the cross-cultural artistic networks that emerged in that cosmopolitan capital in the nineteenth century. European Orientalist artists began traveling to Istanbul in greater numbers in this period, just as the Ottoman elite was becoming more engaged with European art. By the 1870s, a generation of Paris-trained Ottoman artists had returned to Istanbul with ambitions to reshape the visual arts.

Drawing on materials from an array of...