The Imperial Wife

The Imperial Wife PDF Author: Irina Reyn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466887362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love". --Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century empress who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who it turns out faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past. Can a contemporary marriage withstand an “Imperial Wife”?

The Imperial Wife

The Imperial Wife PDF Author: Irina Reyn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466887362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The Imperial Wife is a smart, engaging novel that parallels two fascinating worlds and two singular women. Irina Reyn writes beautifully of immigrants, art and the vagaries of love". --Jess Walter, National Book Award finalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins Two women's lives collide when a priceless Russian artifact comes to light. Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century empress who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who it turns out faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past. Can a contemporary marriage withstand an “Imperial Wife”?

Unrivalled Influence

Unrivalled Influence PDF Author: Judith Herrin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691153213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the exceptional roles that women played in the vibrant cultural and political life of medieval Byzantium. Drawing on a diverse range of sources, this title focuses on the importance of marriage in imperial statecraft, the tense coexistence of empresses in the imperial court, and the critical relationships of mothers and daughters.

Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025-1204

Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025-1204 PDF Author: Barbara Hill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317884655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book will be essential reading for anyone studying Byzantine history in this period. It ranges in time from the death of the emperor Basil II in 1025 to the sacking of the city of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders in 1204, spanning the rise and fall of the successful Komnenos dynasty. Eleventh-century Byzantine history is unusual in that imperial women were able to wield immense power and in this ground-breaking book Dr Hill explores why this was possible and, equally, why they lost their position of influence a century later.

Sexual Decoys

Sexual Decoys PDF Author: Zillah Eisenstein
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848137796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleezza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China

Women’s Poetry of Late Imperial China PDF Author: Xiaorong Li
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.

The Male Empire Under the Female Gaze

The Male Empire Under the Female Gaze PDF Author: Susmita Mittapalli
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621967956
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description


Writing Women in Late Imperial China

Writing Women in Late Imperial China PDF Author: Kang-i Sun Chang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804765916
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 560

Get Book Here

Book Description
Until recently only a handful of women writers were thought to have existed in traditional China, but new scholarship has called attention to several hundred whose works have survived. Coming from the fields of literature, history, art history, and comparative literature, the fourteen contributors to this volume apply a range of methodologies to this new material and to other sources concerning women writers in China from 1600 to 1900. An opening section on courtesans details the lives of individual women and their male admirers--contemporary and subsequent--who imposed an array of meaning on the category of woman writer. The works treated in this section are mainly poetry, although drama also enters in. The second section focuses on the writings of gentrywomen who, confined to the inner quarters of their residences, turned out a body of poetry impressive both for its volume and for the number of authors involved. The third section takes up the issue of contextualization: how male writers situated women's poetry in their essays, stories, and travelogues. The fourth section pursues the same issue, but with reference to China's greatest work of fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber, first published in 1792, most of whose leading characters are talented gentrywomen. The volume concludes with a chapter by a specialist in comparative literature, who relates the concerns of the other chapters to literary and feminist studies outside the China field.

German Women for Empire, 1884-1945

German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 PDF Author: Lora Wildenthal
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822328193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
DIVAnalyses gender, sexuality, feminism, and class in the racial politics of formal German colonialism and postcolonial revanchism./div

Byzantine Women

Byzantine Women PDF Author: Lynda Garland
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754657378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together a group of international scholars in new explorations of the world of Byzantine women in the period 800-1200. The specific aim of this collection is to investigate the participation of women - non-imperial women in particular - in supposedly 'masculine' fields of operation. Contributions focus on women's participation in the street life of Constantinople, their appearance in Byzantine fiscal documents, their monastic foundations, their costume and engagement with entertainment at the imperial court, and the way heroines are portrayed in the Byzantine novels.

Divine Feminine

Divine Feminine PDF Author: Joy Dixon
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801875307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Honorable Mention for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical AssociationChosen by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2003 In 1891, newspapers all over the world carried reports of the death of H. P. Blavatsky, the mysterious Russian woman who was the spiritual founder of the Theosophical Society. With the help of the equally mysterious Mahatmas who were her teachers, Blavatsky claimed to have brought the "ancient wisdom of the East" to the rescue of a materialistic West. In England, Blavatsky's earliest followers were mostly men, but a generation later the Theosophical Society was dominated by women, and theosophy had become a crucial part of feminist political culture. Divine Feminine is the first full-length study of the relationship between alternative or esoteric spirituality and the feminist movement in England. Historian Joy Dixon examines the Theosophical Society's claims that women and the East were the repositories of spiritual forces which English men had forfeited in their scramble for material and imperial power. Theosophists produced arguments that became key tools in many feminist campaigns. Many women of the Theosophical Society became suffragists to promote the spiritualizing of politics, attempting to create a political role for women as a way to "sacralize the public sphere." Dixon also shows that theosophy provides much of the framework and the vocabulary for today's New Age movement. Many of the assumptions about class, race, and gender which marked the emergence of esoteric religions at the end of the nineteenth century continue to shape alternative spiritualities today.