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The Western tradition of excluding women from leadership and disparaging their ability to lead has persisted for centuries, not least in Germany. Even today, resistance to women holding power is embedded in literary, cultural, and historical values that presume a fundamental opposition between the adjective "female" and the substantive "leader." Women who do achieve positions of leadership are faced with a panoply of prejudicial misconceptions: either considered incapable of leadership (conceived of as alpha-male behavior), or pigeonholed as suited only to particular forms of leadership (nurturing, cooperative, egalitarian, communicative, etc.). Focusing on the German-speaking countries, thi...
This biography provides a well-rounded analysis of Queen Charlotte by considering her own perspectives on queenship and her role in Britain. It explores her relationships within the royal family and the court, how she was perceived in the British public sphere and in the press during her reign as queen consort, and the impact of the ‘madness’ of her husband, King George III. This book provides readers with a comprehensive, nuanced, and sensitive analysis of Queen Charlotte’s life and legacy. Charlotte embodied many of the features of queenship and womanhood that were valued in this period, such as charity and familial duty, but she also struggled with her husband’s persistent insanit...
This volume sets out to examine the ways in which an equality between the sexes is constructed, conceptualised, imagined or realised in early modern France, a period and a country which produced some of the earliest theorisations on equality. In so doing, it aims to contribute towards the development of the history of equality as an intellectual category within the history of political thought, and to situate "the woman question" within that history. The eleven chapters in the volume span the fields of political theory, philosophy, literature, history and history of ideas, bringing together literary scholars, historians, philosophers and scholars of political thought, and examining an extens...
Bringing together a variety of evidence, such as princely correspondence, travelogues, financial accounts, chronicles, chivalric or Renaissance poems, this book examines marital travels of princely brides and grooms on a comparative trans-European scale. This book argues that these journeys were extraordinary events and were instrumental for dynastical and monarchical self-representation, and channelled aspirations and anxieties of princely houses when facing each other. Each such journey was a little earthquake that resonated across all layers of society. Hundreds of diplomats, envoys, aristocrats, city officials, low-status personnel, soldiers, artists, musicians, poets, and humanists were...
Context in Literary and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the challenges of studying works of art and literature in their historical context today. The relationship between artworks and context has long been a central concern for aesthetic and cultural disciplines, and the question of context has been asked anew in all eras. Developments in contemporary culture and technology, as well as new theoretical and methodological orientations in the humanities, once again prompt us to rethink context in literary and cultural studies. This volume takes up that challenge. Introducing readers to new developments in literary and cultural theory, Context in Literary and Cult...
This book encounters the figure of the royal woman in the early modern period and explores how she enables and complicates the key moment at which England was emerging as an ideology, a nation, and an empire. Queens and queens consort, historical and fictional, played crucial roles in Renaissance England’s shifting ideologies of nationalist identity. This collection considers how a series of royal women particularly embodied and complicated these many self-constructions of England and complex renditions of “the other.” The period’s influential female monarchs certainly made the queen’s political body more visibly politicized, repatriated, and racialized; these same historical royals were represented as icons of nationalism in many forms and functions. In fictional incarnations, royal women created by the English imagination symbolized and structured those same nation-building narratives. This volume studies royal women’s writings alongside such depictions of royal women, especially as such works collectively enable emergent English ideologies of nationalism and racialization.
The films of Sofia Coppola have moved and entranced audiences with her minimalist style, moody soundscapes, and commitment to centering the lives and experiences of women and girls. A Critical Companion to Sofia Coppola explores the implications of her stories, images, and convictions in a comprehensive study of all eight of her major works. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, each chapter offers a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of one of Coppola’s films and her treatment of core themes like masculinity, sexual politics, bodies, and love. Rigorously researched and unique, the arguments presented within this volume shed new light on one of the most important women filmmakers in film history.
** 'A fantastic, feminist dance through history.' - Julia Quinn What queens would England have had if firstborn daughters, not firstborn sons, had inherited the throne? We may think of princesses as dutiful and elegant, wearing long flowing dresses, but the eldest daughters of England's kings have been very different. Political intriguers. Abducted nuns who demanded divorces. Murderers. It's time we rediscovered the politicians we lost, the masterminds we see negotiating nunneries not armies, the personalities shining brilliantly even hundreds of years later: the queens who should have been. Let's meet them.
Imaginations of female rule and the imaginative strategies of women rulers What is the gender of political power ? What happens to the history of sovereignty when we reconsider it from a gender perspective ? Political sovereignty has been a major theme in European thought from the very beginning of intellectual reflection on community. Philosophy and political theory, historiography, theology, and literature and the arts have, often in dialogue with one another, sought to represent or recalibrate notions of rule. Yet whatever covenant was imagined, sovereign rule has consistently been figured as a male prerogative While in-depth studies of historical women rulers have proliferated in the pas...