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While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.

Cicero has long been seen to embody the values of the Roman Republic. This study of Cicero's use of history reveals that rather than promoting his own values, Cicero uses historical representation to explore the difficulties of finding any ideological coherence in Rome's political or cultural traditions. The book looks to the scepticism of Cicero's philosophical education for an understanding of his perspective on Rome's history, and argues that neglect of the sceptical tradition has transformed the doubting, ambiguous Cicero into the confident proponent of a form of Roman identity formed in his own image. The close reading of a range of his theoretical works make up much of the book: De republica, De oratore, Brutus, and De divinatione are treated in detail, and a range of other works are also discussed. The book explores Cicero's ironic attitude towards Roman history, and connects it to the use of irony in mainstream Latin historians, in particular Sallust and Tacitus. It also examines Cicero's approach to the history of rhetoric at Rome. The book concludes with a study of a little-read treatise on Cicero from the early 18th century, by the radical thinker John Toland, which sheds new light on the history of Cicero's reception. Cicero's use of history shows the flexibility of his understanding of Roman identity. The book argues against the image of Cicero as a writer hoping to coerce his readers into identifying himself and his own achievements with the dominant ideologies of Rome.

This book is a study of the Scottish National Party (SNP) immediately after it came to power in May 2007, based on a survey of the entire membership and elite interviews with over eighty senior party figures. Discussion is located within the appropriate literatures and comparisons drawn with other British parties. The image of the SNP as a youthful party, with a decentralized social movement-type organization, is challenged. The party is much older and much more male than had previously been thought and appears more like other conventional parties than its past image suggested. Its increased membership in recent years hold few clues as to how to re-engage youth as even these recent joiners are predominantly older people, often former members returning to the party. The study questions the value of the civic–ethnic dichotomy in understanding nationalism with SNP members, acknowledging different ways – ethnic and civic – of defining who belongs to the Scottish nation. The picture that emerges is of a reasonably coherent left of centre party that accepts the pragmatism of its leadership. While independence remains the key motivation for joining and being active, a sizeable minority see the party as a means of furthering Scottish interests.

The Naxalite beginnings are by now history, and not a little nostalgia tinges the memory of these dreaded events. The leaders, the organizers, the spine, and the continuity of the movement are the revolutionary intellectuals. The Naxalite movement is not principally a rural, agrarian problem as the doctrine of the Naxalites argues, but is a problem of the leading edge of the urban intelligentsia. Though the Naxalites take their name from the incident at Naxalbari in 1967, the defining attributes of the Naxalite view of revolution emerged only later. From the beginning, it was not the labouring poor of the nation or Bengal that Charu Mazumdar addressed, but, first, the disaffected revolutionary activists within the communist movement and, later, the ‘student–youth’. This book discusses the ideologies of the Naxalite terrorists, the terrorist in the Bengali society, the Communist Party of India, and the Indian economy.

The aim of this book is to encourage an interest in the tradition of modern Western aesthetics as it applies to poetry and the arts. It argues that the study of literature today is unduly dominated by ideology critique, and that there is a need for a new recognition of the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to the arts. It explores ways in which Kant’s aesthetic theory, as set out in the Critique of Judgement, still provides powerful tools of analysis for the modern critic. For example, the Kantian aesthetic — the free judgement of taste — carries a rebuke to the means/end rationality that is so widespread and so dangerous in the contemporary West. It shows that the Kantian ‘judgement of taste’ is a judgement of form and content together, and is thus not a version of formalism. It explores the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the responses to the arts, arguing that aesthetic judgements are not simply disguised judgements of other kinds. Finally, it urges on those writing about literature the value of aesthetic criticism — the attempt to isolate the unique aesthetic quality of artworks — as pioneered by Walter Pater, offering three essays on Latin poets as examples of what might be done.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Puritanism, which he believed could guide the creation of a free, harmonious, and integrated society.

Is the Bible historically true? Or are its narratives the expression of the ideologies of partisan groups far removed in time from the events depicted? The questions are not new, but are now being posed in a different terminology and outlook, often characterized as postmodernism. The book goes back to redefine the term ‘biblical criticism’ and concentrates on some examples from the history of Israel. An attempt is made to clarify the possible meanings of ‘ideology’ and some relations between postmodernism and theology are examined. Tradition and continuity are to be prized in contrast to the feverish grasp at novelty.

Despite the growth of research on masculinity both in Gender Studies and in Classical Studies, and the resurgence of interest in ancient fiction, no volume has yet been devoted to exploring the representation of masculinity in the Greek novels. This book examines three key discourses of ancient Greek masculinity (paideia, andreia, and sexual ideology) evidenced in the five so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels (those of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Heliodorus). Jones argues that while some of the narratives may be set in the classical past, the masculine concerns they display are inescapably symptomatic of the imperial present, and that their male protagonists should therefore be viewed as reflecting some of the ‘gender troubles’ of the real worlds of their authors. Using modern theories of the ‘performance’ of gender as tools for analysis, the study finds that many of the novels’ men betray an awareness that their masculine identities depend very much on the maintenance of their image before others – they are conscious of ‘playing the man’. The book also puts forward the hypothesis that, while most of the authors uphold accepted scripts of masculinity, Achilles Tatius constructs Cleitophon as a ‘misperformer’ of masculinity, as a means of challenging and subverting traditional codes of gender.