You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is a study of gender and power in Victorian Britain. It examines the contribution made by women to the public culture of the British aristocracy in the nineteenth century. It challenges the view that power and authority were predominantly masculine attributes and shows that a partnership of authority between men and women was integral to aristocratic life. The book is thus an important addition to the debate on `separate spheres'. Dr Reynolds explores the roles of aristocratic women in estate management, patronage of churches and schools, and in caring for the poor and other dependants. She shows how women were at the heart of the local communities and institutions on which aristocratic power was based. The book goes on to discuss the realm of national politics, analysing women's participation in the electoral process, in Westminster-based political life, and at Queen Victoria's court. Based on a wide range of previously unused archival sources, Aristocratic Women and Political Society presents a lively portrait of women's experiences and a corrective to the view of the upper-class Victorian woman as a passive social butterfly.
The real lives of women in Britain's country houses.
None
What if the American literary canon were expanded to consistently represent women writers, who do not always fit easily into genres and periods established on the basis of men's writings? How would the study of American literature benefit from this long-needed revision? This timely collection of essays by fourteen women writers breaks new ground in American literary study. Not content to rediscover and awkwardly "fit" female writers into the "white male" scheme of anthologies and college courses, editors Margaret Dickie and Joyce W. Warren question the current boundaries of literary periods, advocating a revised literary canon. The essays consider a wide range of American women writers, incl...
Ruling America offers a panoramic history of our country's ruling elites from the time of the American Revolution to the present. At its heart is the greatest of American paradoxes: How have tiny minorities of the rich and privileged consistently exercised so much power in a nation built on the notion of rule by the people? In a series of thought-provoking essays, leading scholars of American history examine every epoch in which ruling economic elites have shaped our national experience. They explore how elites came into existence, how they established their dominance over public affairs, and how their rule came to an end. The contributors analyze the elite coalition that led the Revolution ...
Jack Pease was at the heart of the British Liberal government from 1908 to 1915, holding the position of Chief Whip through two general elections, and a member of the Cabinet confronting domestic tumult, international tensions, and war. Pease's text provides a uniquely comprehensive understanding of Asquith's government in peace and war.
Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton’s representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton’s complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgment of Wharton’s sources sheds light both on the author’s model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton’s travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.
An exploration of political culture in Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century, revealing how Arthur Balfour and his circle served as a clear bridge between the Victorians and the moderns in Britain's twentieth-century political culture. Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930) was born toward the beginning of Queen Victoria's long reign. At her death in 1901, he was a year away from becoming the first prime minister of the Edwardian era. In the quarter century after hisentry into political life in the 1870s, Britain experienced material changes and a sense of intensifying human interactions as dramatic to his generation as the forces of globalization are today. Aristocrats watched anx...
An original, richly illustrated analysis of American honeymooning, 1820-1900, that offers fresh insights into the intersecting histories of tourism, consumerism, sentiment, sexuality, and conjugality
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 When Broadway Was the Runway explores the central and largely unacknowledged role of commercial Broadway theater in the birth of modern American fashion and consumer culture. Long before Hollywood's red carpet spectacles, Broadway theater introduced American women to the latest styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theater impresarios captured the imagination of their largely female patrons by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle. Theater historian Marlis Schweitzer examines how these impresarios presented the dresses actresses wore onstage, as well as the jewelry and hairstyles th...