Catherine Gallagher
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182436
- eISBN:
- 9780191673801
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182436.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter discusses the political and economic transformation of Charlotte Lennox in the mid-eighteenth century. It examines her reformation at the discursive intersection of several key terms ...
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This chapter discusses the political and economic transformation of Charlotte Lennox in the mid-eighteenth century. It examines her reformation at the discursive intersection of several key terms that were being revised at the same time, such as ‘woman’, ‘fiction’, and ‘sympathy’. The chapter focuses on a set of connections between property and propriety, which in turn explains why female authorship and fiction writing gained cultural prestige during this period.Less
This chapter discusses the political and economic transformation of Charlotte Lennox in the mid-eighteenth century. It examines her reformation at the discursive intersection of several key terms that were being revised at the same time, such as ‘woman’, ‘fiction’, and ‘sympathy’. The chapter focuses on a set of connections between property and propriety, which in turn explains why female authorship and fiction writing gained cultural prestige during this period.
Katherine Adams
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195336801
- eISBN:
- 9780199868360
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336801.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the ...
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This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the public sphere and destroy free democratic association. The argument focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayals of Sojourner Truth in her 1856 novel Dred and her 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” It shows how Stowe operates within a pattern of representation that poses blacks as figures of privation—that is, as subjects enslaved by their own bodies, incapable of self-containing self-government—through which white Americans deflected the problem of their own surplus embodiment and the failures of free labor and market idealism that produced it. The chapter demonstrates that Stowe uses Truth to engage this national crisis of uncontained bodies and, in so doing, to negotiate the embodied limits of her own female authorship.Less
This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the public sphere and destroy free democratic association. The argument focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayals of Sojourner Truth in her 1856 novel Dred and her 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” It shows how Stowe operates within a pattern of representation that poses blacks as figures of privation—that is, as subjects enslaved by their own bodies, incapable of self-containing self-government—through which white Americans deflected the problem of their own surplus embodiment and the failures of free labor and market idealism that produced it. The chapter demonstrates that Stowe uses Truth to engage this national crisis of uncontained bodies and, in so doing, to negotiate the embodied limits of her own female authorship.
Matthew Head
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780520273849
- eISBN:
- 9780520954762
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520273849.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Women composed and published music far more freely in the late eighteenth century than would have been predicted by the now conventional prohibition hypothesis, that is, the idea they were “not ...
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Women composed and published music far more freely in the late eighteenth century than would have been predicted by the now conventional prohibition hypothesis, that is, the idea they were “not meant” to do it. The meaning of female composing is nonetheless difficult to recover. A case study of Minna Brandes-a singer and actress whose music was published as a posthumous memorial after her death, at 23, in 1788-suggests that composing was at the boundary of virtue and vice. On her death, Minna Brandes’s father and her teacher, Hönicke, stressed that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. Brandes’s memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the female dead in which the corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Her activities as a composer were set within a framework of bourgeois femininity. However, such representations were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian Brandes’s later memoirs in which his daughter’s turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct.Less
Women composed and published music far more freely in the late eighteenth century than would have been predicted by the now conventional prohibition hypothesis, that is, the idea they were “not meant” to do it. The meaning of female composing is nonetheless difficult to recover. A case study of Minna Brandes-a singer and actress whose music was published as a posthumous memorial after her death, at 23, in 1788-suggests that composing was at the boundary of virtue and vice. On her death, Minna Brandes’s father and her teacher, Hönicke, stressed that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. Brandes’s memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the female dead in which the corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Her activities as a composer were set within a framework of bourgeois femininity. However, such representations were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian Brandes’s later memoirs in which his daughter’s turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct.
Irene González-López and Michael Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474409698
- eISBN:
- 9781474444637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409698.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and ...
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The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes.
Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes.
This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women.
The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking.
Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.Less
The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes.
Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes.
This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women.
The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking.
Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.
Robin Roberts
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496815569
- eISBN:
- 9781496815606
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496815569.003.0008
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
The conclusion provides an overview of the analysis of individual texts and explains their connections. The continuation of the tradition appears in a brief discussion of the female ghost in Natashia ...
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The conclusion provides an overview of the analysis of individual texts and explains their connections. The continuation of the tradition appears in a brief discussion of the female ghost in Natashia Deón’s recent novel, Grace. The persistence of the female ghost in popular culture over a long time period and in many genres suggests that this figure provides an effective outlet for deep cultural concerns. The narratives covered in The Untold Story reveal that, although the female ghost is by definition disembodied, she encapsulates the feminine body, especially the power of the maternal body. The female ghost confronts issues of narrative control and language, with the figure presenting an alternative to male-dominated discourse. Relationships between women living and dead develop, promoting the idea of feminine solidarity. And male characters are educated, usually against their will, into an understanding of alternative paths to knowledge.Less
The conclusion provides an overview of the analysis of individual texts and explains their connections. The continuation of the tradition appears in a brief discussion of the female ghost in Natashia Deón’s recent novel, Grace. The persistence of the female ghost in popular culture over a long time period and in many genres suggests that this figure provides an effective outlet for deep cultural concerns. The narratives covered in The Untold Story reveal that, although the female ghost is by definition disembodied, she encapsulates the feminine body, especially the power of the maternal body. The female ghost confronts issues of narrative control and language, with the figure presenting an alternative to male-dominated discourse. Relationships between women living and dead develop, promoting the idea of feminine solidarity. And male characters are educated, usually against their will, into an understanding of alternative paths to knowledge.
Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474419444
- eISBN:
- 9781474444682
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419444.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This book, like its twin volume Female Agency and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issue in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practice. Addressing the politics of ...
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This book, like its twin volume Female Agency and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issue in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practice. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Authorship and the Documentary Image engages with the relationship between female documentary filmmakers and the documentary image. With a thematic focus on the documentary image directly, within the more traditional arenas of theory and practice, and especially within the context of gaze and author theory, the book also considers more philosophical questions of aesthetics, home and identity within the contexts of female subjectivity, globalisation and trauma. In addition, the book includes a dialogue on two key photographers, Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence, as well as an interview with Taiwanese documentary filmmakers Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.Less
This book, like its twin volume Female Agency and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issue in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practice. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Authorship and the Documentary Image engages with the relationship between female documentary filmmakers and the documentary image. With a thematic focus on the documentary image directly, within the more traditional arenas of theory and practice, and especially within the context of gaze and author theory, the book also considers more philosophical questions of aesthetics, home and identity within the contexts of female subjectivity, globalisation and trauma. In addition, the book includes a dialogue on two key photographers, Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence, as well as an interview with Taiwanese documentary filmmakers Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.
Hero Chalmers
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199273270
- eISBN:
- 9780191706356
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273270.003.06
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This afterword briefly examines the modulations of royalist female authorship into the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Although there are definite strands of continuity — in, say, the Behn-like ...
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This afterword briefly examines the modulations of royalist female authorship into the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Although there are definite strands of continuity — in, say, the Behn-like eroticised image of Delariviere Manley or the importance of friendship and exile in the work of Jane Barker — the greater emphasis on moral and sentimental notions of femininity emphasises the degree to which the political climate of the decades around the Restoration provided royalist women writers with exceptional conditions for authorial self-assertion and literary experimentation.Less
This afterword briefly examines the modulations of royalist female authorship into the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Although there are definite strands of continuity — in, say, the Behn-like eroticised image of Delariviere Manley or the importance of friendship and exile in the work of Jane Barker — the greater emphasis on moral and sentimental notions of femininity emphasises the degree to which the political climate of the decades around the Restoration provided royalist women writers with exceptional conditions for authorial self-assertion and literary experimentation.
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226481180
- eISBN:
- 9780226481173
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226481173.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter, which examines the general pattern of female authorship in the sciences in Victorian England, discusses the different routes taken by these women to scientific authorship and describes ...
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This chapter, which examines the general pattern of female authorship in the sciences in Victorian England, discusses the different routes taken by these women to scientific authorship and describes their appeal to readers. It also investigates how these women writers experimented with literary formats in order to reach their readers, and analyzes their responses to the views of scientific naturalists on the implications of evolutionary theory for understanding the role of Christianity and of women in Victorian society.Less
This chapter, which examines the general pattern of female authorship in the sciences in Victorian England, discusses the different routes taken by these women to scientific authorship and describes their appeal to readers. It also investigates how these women writers experimented with literary formats in order to reach their readers, and analyzes their responses to the views of scientific naturalists on the implications of evolutionary theory for understanding the role of Christianity and of women in Victorian society.
Melissa Sodeman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804791328
- eISBN:
- 9780804792790
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791328.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Sentimental Memorials explores how popular women writers used the art form of the novel to record their changing relations to literary history. At the end of the eighteenth century, as sentimental ...
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Sentimental Memorials explores how popular women writers used the art form of the novel to record their changing relations to literary history. At the end of the eighteenth century, as sentimental fiction slipped out of emerging conceptions of literary value, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson reflected on what changes in literature’s meaning and status would mean for their own works and legacies. Their novels provide a means of understanding how women novelists clarified, protested, and finally memorialized the historical conditions under which they wrote. Calling for a new understanding of sentimental fiction as a self-historicizing and highly self-conscious genre, Sentimental Memorials sheds new light on sentimental novels, on female authorship, and on the history of the transformations reshaping literature at the end of the eighteenth century.Less
Sentimental Memorials explores how popular women writers used the art form of the novel to record their changing relations to literary history. At the end of the eighteenth century, as sentimental fiction slipped out of emerging conceptions of literary value, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson reflected on what changes in literature’s meaning and status would mean for their own works and legacies. Their novels provide a means of understanding how women novelists clarified, protested, and finally memorialized the historical conditions under which they wrote. Calling for a new understanding of sentimental fiction as a self-historicizing and highly self-conscious genre, Sentimental Memorials sheds new light on sentimental novels, on female authorship, and on the history of the transformations reshaping literature at the end of the eighteenth century.
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474425261
- eISBN:
- 9781474449632
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474425261.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter focalises on Nancy Meyers, arguably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time. It shows how Meyers’s carefully composed mise-en-scène and the portrayal of privileged women ...
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This chapter focalises on Nancy Meyers, arguably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time. It shows how Meyers’s carefully composed mise-en-scène and the portrayal of privileged women protagonists contribute to a critical alignment between the director and her films, and at the same time how they are used to demonstrate Meyers’s lack of credibility as an auteur (a reading strategy which often impacts other women directors, such as Sofia Coppola, as analysed in Ch. 5). This analysis is framed within the broader discussions of auteurism, the generic conventions of the romcom and the so-called feminisation of mass culture (Husseyn 1986, Hollows 2005), as well as the cultural, critical and industrial gendering of genres. The remainder of the chapter offers an examination of The Intern (2015). The film has been dubbed as ‘a romantic comedy without the romance’, and it indeed draws on several of its generic conventions: romance’s narrative stages, the presence of the ‘wrong partner’, the sense of ‘belonging together’, and bromantic elements which allow for a rethinking of the gendering of genres. The detailed analysis of the film reveals Meyers’s self-reflexive strategies – rich discursive histories engendered by the presence of stars Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, among others – that invoke issues of central importance in this book: the question of female authorship in a male-dominated film industry, and the heritage and evolution of genre in the Hollywood context.Less
This chapter focalises on Nancy Meyers, arguably the most successful woman filmmaker of all time. It shows how Meyers’s carefully composed mise-en-scène and the portrayal of privileged women protagonists contribute to a critical alignment between the director and her films, and at the same time how they are used to demonstrate Meyers’s lack of credibility as an auteur (a reading strategy which often impacts other women directors, such as Sofia Coppola, as analysed in Ch. 5). This analysis is framed within the broader discussions of auteurism, the generic conventions of the romcom and the so-called feminisation of mass culture (Husseyn 1986, Hollows 2005), as well as the cultural, critical and industrial gendering of genres. The remainder of the chapter offers an examination of The Intern (2015). The film has been dubbed as ‘a romantic comedy without the romance’, and it indeed draws on several of its generic conventions: romance’s narrative stages, the presence of the ‘wrong partner’, the sense of ‘belonging together’, and bromantic elements which allow for a rethinking of the gendering of genres. The detailed analysis of the film reveals Meyers’s self-reflexive strategies – rich discursive histories engendered by the presence of stars Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway, among others – that invoke issues of central importance in this book: the question of female authorship in a male-dominated film industry, and the heritage and evolution of genre in the Hollywood context.
Ayako Saito
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474409698
- eISBN:
- 9781474444637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409698.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter ...
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Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.Less
Female authorship is the subject of this chapter, which concentrates on Tanaka’s third film, The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, 1955). This was her first collaboration with scriptwriter Tanaka Sumie, and the chapter reveals the negotiation between two very different women of the same generation who worked together to articulate female subjectivity. Examining their distinct life experiences and approaches to the depiction of women (and female sexuality in particular) works to position Tanaka in the history of Japanese women’s cinema and melodrama. An exhaustive analysis of screenplays, shooting scripts, interviews, and contemporary reviews renders visible Tanaka’s authorial voice as a woman and her visual translation and intervention in Sumie’s script. The chapter makes a case of Tanaka’s creative directorial worth, while exposing why both the film industry and film studies may have hitherto overlooked her directed works.
Gail Vanstone
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474419475
- eISBN:
- 9781474444699
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419475.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. ...
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Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.Less
Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.
Anna Misiak
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474419475
- eISBN:
- 9781474444699
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419475.003.0011
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films ...
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This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.Less
This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.
Rebecca Krug
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781501705335
- eISBN:
- 9781501708169
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501705335.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a ...
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Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. This book shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement. An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. This book shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. It offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.Less
Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. This book shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement. An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. This book shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. It offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.
Olivia Khoo
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474461764
- eISBN:
- 9781474495189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461764.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique ...
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This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique qualities of the short film allow women filmmakers to actively engage with each other’s work within and across the region, and how this transnational connection is redefining how we might come to understand the figure of the individual ‘auteur’ of Asian cinema.Less
This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique qualities of the short film allow women filmmakers to actively engage with each other’s work within and across the region, and how this transnational connection is redefining how we might come to understand the figure of the individual ‘auteur’ of Asian cinema.
Melissa Sodeman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804791328
- eISBN:
- 9780804792790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791328.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter explores Mary Robinson’s attempt to simultaneously capitalize on her notoriety to sell books and to triumph over her damaged reputation. Infamous in the 1780s for her highly public ...
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This chapter explores Mary Robinson’s attempt to simultaneously capitalize on her notoriety to sell books and to triumph over her damaged reputation. Infamous in the 1780s for her highly public sexual liaisons, Robinson later leveraged her renown and literary talent into a reputation as a female genius. Her bid for literary fame, however, ran into trouble as popular sentimental literature slipped out of emerging notions of literary canonicity. As the transience of her particular mode of female genius became apparent, Robinson used her fiction to reflect on the ephemerality of sentimental form and the short-lived nature of women’s literary fame. Her novels link the decline of female genius and the passing of sentimental literature to consider what these twin losses mean for women’s literary history.Less
This chapter explores Mary Robinson’s attempt to simultaneously capitalize on her notoriety to sell books and to triumph over her damaged reputation. Infamous in the 1780s for her highly public sexual liaisons, Robinson later leveraged her renown and literary talent into a reputation as a female genius. Her bid for literary fame, however, ran into trouble as popular sentimental literature slipped out of emerging notions of literary canonicity. As the transience of her particular mode of female genius became apparent, Robinson used her fiction to reflect on the ephemerality of sentimental form and the short-lived nature of women’s literary fame. Her novels link the decline of female genius and the passing of sentimental literature to consider what these twin losses mean for women’s literary history.
Carys Crossen
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719089343
- eISBN:
- 9781781708743
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719089343.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of literature featuring female werewolves. Not only did the female werewolf make her first appearance in written fiction, but it was also the ...
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The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of literature featuring female werewolves. Not only did the female werewolf make her first appearance in written fiction, but it was also the first century that saw female authors appropriate the figure of the female lycanthrope for their works of literature. This chapter focuses on Clemence Housman’s ‘The Werewolf’ and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’ to explore gender anxieties and changing social roles at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on theorisations of female authorship, it posits the female werewolf as the Gothic ‘dark double’ and suggests a reading of this figure as the external embodiment of authors’ rebellious and active tendencies. However, the chapter also suggests that the paradoxical sense of irresolution in these examples of late Victorian literature, arguing that there appears to be no way to reconcile the more mutinous elements of femininity to society expectations in these lycanthropic tales.Less
The nineteenth century was a significant one in terms of literature featuring female werewolves. Not only did the female werewolf make her first appearance in written fiction, but it was also the first century that saw female authors appropriate the figure of the female lycanthrope for their works of literature. This chapter focuses on Clemence Housman’s ‘The Werewolf’ and Rosamund Marriott Watson’s ‘A Ballad of the Were-wolf’ to explore gender anxieties and changing social roles at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on theorisations of female authorship, it posits the female werewolf as the Gothic ‘dark double’ and suggests a reading of this figure as the external embodiment of authors’ rebellious and active tendencies. However, the chapter also suggests that the paradoxical sense of irresolution in these examples of late Victorian literature, arguing that there appears to be no way to reconcile the more mutinous elements of femininity to society expectations in these lycanthropic tales.
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199676521
- eISBN:
- 9780191755675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199676521.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, Poetry
This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish's early works, including the philosophical poetry of Poems, and Fancies, and the esoteric essays of The Worlds Olio. As she starts her literary career, ...
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This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish's early works, including the philosophical poetry of Poems, and Fancies, and the esoteric essays of The Worlds Olio. As she starts her literary career, Cavendish frequently claims to have read nothing. She shuns bookish learning for an ideal of originality which is organic and spontaneously productive. It is argued that Cavendish's denials of reading are not simply feminine modesty or defensiveness, but show her embracing ideals of modernity; parallels emerge with thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, and poets like William Davenant who were championing originality over imitation as their literary ideal. The chapter traces Cavendish's witty critique of the blazon tradition in which women are described through a catalogue of natural objects. She upturns this Petrarchan and Cavalier tradition in two ways, through science and through poetic genre. These witty connections challenge our conception of women's relationship to science at the birth of the Royal Society.Less
This chapter examines Margaret Cavendish's early works, including the philosophical poetry of Poems, and Fancies, and the esoteric essays of The Worlds Olio. As she starts her literary career, Cavendish frequently claims to have read nothing. She shuns bookish learning for an ideal of originality which is organic and spontaneously productive. It is argued that Cavendish's denials of reading are not simply feminine modesty or defensiveness, but show her embracing ideals of modernity; parallels emerge with thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, and poets like William Davenant who were championing originality over imitation as their literary ideal. The chapter traces Cavendish's witty critique of the blazon tradition in which women are described through a catalogue of natural objects. She upturns this Petrarchan and Cavalier tradition in two ways, through science and through poetic genre. These witty connections challenge our conception of women's relationship to science at the birth of the Royal Society.
Wakae Nakane
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474419444
- eISBN:
- 9781474444682
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419444.003.0012
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an ...
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The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an alternative way of constructing relationships among people’. She also claims that indicate a possibility to ‘go beyond the binarism between ‘individual’ and ‘society’’ by creating an ‘intimate sphere’ which transcends the general idea of societal discourse.Less
The majority of Naomi Kawase’s documentary films are based on her own life experiences, leading to conclusions that they are entirely self-reflexive. The author argues that ‘they instead show an alternative way of constructing relationships among people’. She also claims that indicate a possibility to ‘go beyond the binarism between ‘individual’ and ‘society’’ by creating an ‘intimate sphere’ which transcends the general idea of societal discourse.
Siwan M. Rosser
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620047
- eISBN:
- 9781789629613
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620047.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing ...
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This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing relationship with, and offers perspective on, the patriarchal, imperial ideologies traditionally associated with imitations of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The chapter contends that the didactic impulse of this particular Robinsonade is to inculcate within its young readers a sense of Welsh national and cultural difference; like many other popular adventure novels written in Welsh from the 1910s to the 1930s, Moelona’s novel is specifically designed to entice readers and to instil a sense of pride in their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that this text is a teaching tool that embodies the tension between creativity and didacticism, and which ultimately allows its young readers to navigate an understanding of what it meant to be a young Welsh adolescent in early 20th-century Britain.Less
This chapter argues that The Dreams of Myfanwy, written by Welsh writer Moelona and concerned with the experiences of the female author writing in a minority language, negotiates an intriguing relationship with, and offers perspective on, the patriarchal, imperial ideologies traditionally associated with imitations of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The chapter contends that the didactic impulse of this particular Robinsonade is to inculcate within its young readers a sense of Welsh national and cultural difference; like many other popular adventure novels written in Welsh from the 1910s to the 1930s, Moelona’s novel is specifically designed to entice readers and to instil a sense of pride in their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. The chapter concludes by arguing that this text is a teaching tool that embodies the tension between creativity and didacticism, and which ultimately allows its young readers to navigate an understanding of what it meant to be a young Welsh adolescent in early 20th-century Britain.