Explains Austen's methods, motivations, and morals The fun and easy way(r) to understand and enjoy Jane Austen Want to know more about Jane Austen? This friendly guide gives the scoop on her life, works, and lasting impact on our culture. It chronicles the events of her brief life, examines each of her novels, and looks at why her stories - of women and marriage, class and money, scandal and hypocrisy, emotion and satire - still have meaning for us today. Discover * Why Austen is so popular * The impact on manners, courtships, and dating * Love and life in Austen's world * Her life and key influences * Her most memorable characters
From the end of Reconstruction and into the New South era, more than one thousand white southern women attended one of the Seven Sister colleges: Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard. Joan Marie Johnson looks at how such educations—in the North, at some of the country’s best schools—influenced southern women to challenge their traditional gender roles and become active in woman suffrage and other social reforms of the Progressive Era South. Attending one of the Seven Sister colleges, Johnson argues, could transform a southern woman indoctrinated in notions of domesticity and dependence into someone with newfound confidence and leadership skills. Many southern students at northern schools imported the values they imbibed at college, returning home to found schools of their own, women’s clubs, and woman suffrage associations. At the same time, during college and after graduation, southern women maintained a complicated relationship to home, nurturing their regional identity and remaining loyal to the ideals of the Confederacy. Johnson explores why students sought a classical liberal arts education, how they prepared for entrance examinations, and how they felt as southerners on northern campuses. She draws on personal writings, information gleaned from college publications and records, and data on the women’s decisions about marriage, work, children, and other life-altering concerns. In their time, the women studied in this book would eventually make up a disproportionately high percentage of the elite southern female leadership. This collective biography highlights the important part they played in forging new roles for women, especially in social reform, education, and suffrage.
Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband’s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art—and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.
Claire Malloy, for as long as she can remember, has been the local bookseller and owner of the Book Depot and the widowed mother of teenage Caron, who frequently speaks in ALL CAPS. But her life has changed dramatically in recent years. Claire has married her longtime beau, Deputy Police Chief Peter Rosen. Still the owner of the Book Depot, Claire has passed the day-to-day running of it on to her very efficient employees. With Caron inching ever closer to college, there's but one thing that remains steadfastly unchanged—Claire's astonishing ability to attract, find, or even just randomly stumble across trouble. Summoned for jury duty, the prosecutor on a murder case, harboring a grudge against her husband, decides to humiliate Claire and dismiss her. Having done so in spectacular enough fashion to make the local news, Claire decides that revenge will be the next dish she serves. She hunts down the defendant in the case, a woman accused of murdering her husband, and offers to help prove her innocence. And not just because Claire wants to humiliate the prosecutor. There are only two problems. One—the defendant is looking guiltier by the minute. And two—the worst day imaginable has finally come: Claire's dreaded new mother-in-law is coming to visit and life in prison is starting to look good.
Sometimes, the only answer is an angel. As a woman flees an abusive boyfriend, her gas tank on empty, money materializes in her empty purse. Millions of fireflies suddenly appear and offer guiding light to desperate refugees trying to find a path through a mountain storm. Two women strongly sense that a missionary priest, far away, needs prayer at the exact moment when he faces catastrophe. These are just a few of the more than thirty true stories recounted in Angels and Wonders, a book that points readers to the spiritual realm for answers to otherwise inexplicable occurrences. For anyone inclined toward spirituality, each amazing story provides further proof of God’s heavenly care in difficult times; for those who aren’t sure if heaven really does intervene on earth, this book provides plenty of reasons for them to doubt their disbelief.
A feast for any lover of English children's books. -Christian Herald Over sixty years ago, Joan Bodger, her husband, and their two children traveled to the UK for the adventure of a lifetime. There, they sought to discover the lands they knew from their beloved children’s books. Come along and see for yourself the people and places behind the stories we love. In Edinburgh, they stand outside the childhood home of Robert Louis Stevenson. They discover the countryside that inspired Caldecott's illustrations in Whitworth. In the Lake District, the farm where Jemima Puddle-duck laid her eggs. And in Winnie the Pooh Country Mrs. Milne herself shows the way to “that enchanted place on the top of the Forest [where] a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” Join their adventures, from sleeping in a wagon to “messing about” in boats on the Thames. While not all their quests end in victory, like any marvelous story, how they get there is what matters. While we can’t all make the journey ourselves, we can let Joan Bodger take us along. As Emily Dickinson says, even if we “have never seen a moor”, we can still imagine “how the heather looks.” How the Heather Looks has been called ‘the book most often stolen by retiring children’s librarians”. This new edition features the stunning art by Mark Lang, and the authors’ afterword, written thirty years after the book was first released.
Two of today's leading experts on the Christian political tradition plumb significant moments in premodern Christian political thought, using them in original and adventurous ways to clarify, criticize, and redirect contemporary political perspectives and discussions. Drawing on the Bible and the Western history of ideas, Oliver and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan explore key Christian voices on "the political" -- political action, political institutions, and political society. Covered here are Bonaventure, Thomas, Ockham, Wycliff, Erasmus, Luther, Grotius, Barth, Ramsey, and key modern papal encyclicals. The authors' discussion takes them across a wide range of political concerns, from economics and personal freedom to liberal democracy and the nature of statehood. Ultimately, these insightful essays point to political judgment as the strength of the past theological tradition and its eclipse as the weakness of present political thought.
In this riveting biography of Elizabeth Seton critically acclaimed and bestselling author Joan Barthel tells the mesmerizing story of a woman whose life featured wealth and poverty, passion and sorrow, love and loss. Elizabeth was born into a prominent New York City family in 1774. Her father was the chief health officer for the Port of New York and she lived down the block from Alexander Hamilton. She danced at George Washington's sixty-fifth Birthday Ball wearing cream slippers, monogrammed. Catholicism was illegal in New York when she was born; Catholic priests seen in the city were arrested, sometimes hung. When Elizabeth and her wealthy husband Will sailed to Italy in a doomed attempt to cure his tuberculosis, she and her family were quarantined in a damp dungeon. And when Elizabeth later became a Catholic, she was so scorned that people talked of burning down her house. American Saint is the inspiring story of a brave woman who forged the way for the other women who followed and who made a name for herself in a world entirely ruled by men. Elizabeth resisted male clerical control of her religious order, as nuns are doing today, and the publication of her story could not be more timely. Maya Angelou has contributed the foreword.
The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.
This book argues that Shaw was a masterful reader of Ibsen's plays both as texts and as the cornerstone of the modern theatre. Dismantling the notion that Shaw distorted Ibsen to promote his own view of the world, and establishing Shaw’s initial interest in Ibsen as the poet of Peer Gynt, it chronicles Shaw’s important role in the London Ibsen campaign and exposes the falsity of the tradition that Shaw branded Ibsen as a socialist. Further, this study shows that Shaw’s famous but maligned The Quintessence of Ibsenism reflects Ibsen’s own anti-idealist notion of his work and argues that Shaw’s readings of Ibsen’s plays are pioneering analyses that anticipate later criticism. It offers new readings of Shaw’s “Ibsenist” plays as well as a comprehensive account of Ibsen’s importance for Shaw’s dramatic criticism, from his early journalism to Our Theatres of the Nineties, both as a weapon against the inanities of the Victorian stage and as the standard bearer for modernism.
Lavishly illustrated, Persuasion and Propaganda is the first study of these works of art within the framework of colonial politics and political culture. While examining the rise of the idea of the public in the modern world, Joan Coutu also explores how "empire" was constantly being redefined. From private funeral monuments in the West Indies to works erected by the East India Company and the British Parliament, Coutu shows how the youthful British Empire saw itself and validated its mission through sculpture.
Under the strict rule of twentieth century Irish censorship, creators of novels, films, and most periodicals found no option but to submit and conform to standards. Stage productions, however, escaped official censorship. The theater became a "public space"—a place to air cultural confrontations between Church and State, individual and community, and "freedom of the theatre" versus the audience’s right to disagree. Joan FitzPatrick Dean’s Riot and Great Anger suggests that while there was no state censorship in early-twentieth-century Ireland, the theater often evoked heated responses from theatergoers, sometimes resulting in riots and the public denunciation of playwrights and artists. Dean examines the plays that provoked these controversies, the degree to which they were "censored" by the audience or actors, and the range of responses from both the press and the courts. She addresses familiar pieces such as those of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Sean O’Casey, as well as the works of less known playwrights such as George Birmingham. Dean’s original research meticulously analyzes Ireland’s great theatrical tradition, both on the stage and off, concluding that the public responses to these controversial productions reveal a country that, at century’s end as at its beginning, was pluralistic, heterogeneous, and complex.
Novelist Augustus Trevor has written a manuscript that reveals the darkest secrets of his guests. Whoever can solve Trevor's clues can have his story removed from the book. But when Trevor is bludgeoned to death, the survivors (along with the reader) are challenged to find both the manuscript and the murderer.
Amidst the turbulence and gaiety existing in American society during the last decade of the 20th century, the paths of two young men and a young woman merge. Each is inexorably drawn to a midnight rendezvous on a lonely road in northern Kentucky, and ghastly and fatal consequences result.
In this collection of true accounts involving ordinary people, Joan Wester Anderson has gathered dozens of stories which tell of tender coincidences, inspirational healings, and safe passage through the very heart of trouble and danger.
Animal Land surveys the role of humanized animals in the classic literature for children, and bodes well to become a classic in its own right. It is an entertaining and equally serious and remarkably thorough look into a collective literature which introduced us to our early friends in books. Animals tend to outlive humans in the imaginations of appreciators of children's books. And few of the character encountered in adult fiction seem to remain as vivid and complete in the mind as The Velveteen Rabbit, Babar, Brer Rabbit, Bambi, Black Beauty, and WInnie the Pooh. Meet them again here. Ponder them, because they will not leave us alone" --
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