Beautiful Daughter Research Articles

"I Love Every Part of You"

"I Love Every Part of You"

The Family Fortuna by Lindsay Eagar (review)

Reviewed by: The Family Fortuna by Lindsay Eagar Wesley Jacques Eagar, Lindsay The Family Fortuna. Candlewick, 2023 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780763692353 $19.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 Arturo Fortuna is one of the greatest showmen alive, and the Family Fortuna traveling circus has wowed audiences from "Texas to Tacoma" by way of his charisma and the labor of his children: a singularly beautiful daughter showcased to gawkers in the kootchie tent, a dwarf son with a knack for bookkeeping, and Avita, the show-stopping Bird Girl, whose feathered strangeness is, according to her often persuasively callous father, "worth a thousand whores." When the Fortunas return to Peculiar, a late nineteenth-century American desert town, a rival circus and longstanding riffs in the family's exploitation and spectacle-focused dynamic present a turning point for the maturing daughters, frustrated son, pious mom, and deeply [End Page 255] flawed father alike. Narrator Avita falling for a traveling artist brings about a particular shift of the status quo in a richly compelling story about sympathetic, queer, and remarkable carny folks that consistently delivers earnest and heartfelt camp. Eager's punchy, funny prose never falters, and Avita's relatable development—sexual and otherwise—alongside her siblings' pursuit of some semblance of independence from the large, looming figure of their father cleverly reshapes concepts of beauty, seduction, and coming-of-age. Readers will want to grab tickets to this thoughtful, provocative read. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Editor’s Note

It has been seven years and now, seven issues later, the International Journal of Persian Literature is going as strong as ever thanks to the many enthusiastic scholars who have been helping us appreciate the magnificence of Persian literature and its many multifaceted intellectual engagements. This was a sad year for Persian literature with the loss of one of the greatest Arabist scholars and philologists, and no less one of the greatest Persian philologists and literati in the history of Persian literature, Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani. One of the paragons, irreplaceable in every aspect, he trained some of the greatest scholars in the field and contributed, with his eminently surgical attention to detail, to Persian and Arabic literatures and all of their substudies, whether it be history, jurisprudence, logic, philosophy, poetry, prose, etc. Our next issue (issue 8) will be a Gedenkschrift special issue in celebration of his scholarly achievements, although it would take many decades (and dozens of issues) to actually come close to satisfying such want. Often in special issues in a field, one has to be careful what themes are addressed; however, in his case that won’t be necessary as his umbrella of expertise was all-encompassing in Iranian and Arab philology. That said, we do hope this volume, which behooves some novel engagements in the field, will be enjoyed by our loyal readers. We would also like to thank you, our readers, and our many contributors for their support. Many thanks go to Valerie Ahwee for being such a good friend to the journal for years and always making us look better with her wonderful and attentive copyediting skills. A final thanks goes to the wonderful PSU team, editorial and otherwise, for being the best publishing team one can hope to work with. This journal is a team effort and every person and group mentioned is equally credited with the journal’s success.This issue is dedicated to my day, my night, my sun, my moon, my ocean, my desert, my air, my wind, my mountain, my pillar, my earth, my world, my beautiful daughter Iran Ghazal Korangy whose every word, unparalleled willpower, and drive inspires in me a world of effort; and thanks infinitum to God for endowing me with this blessing.

Balinese Calonarang in Performance

Balinese <i>Calonarang</i> in Performance

Three Perspectives on the Passing of Larry Klein

Three Perspectives on the Passing of Larry Klein

“Castration or Decapitation?” A Feminist Reading of Two Stories by Angela Carter

This article examines two stories by Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber” (1979) and “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter” (1974) to account for Carter’s unique and ambivalent dismantling of patriarchal myths. Carter conflates two patriarchal tropes, castration and decapitation, to figure the oppression of women while allowing for an avenue of resistance. Using the French version of feminism, the work of Hélène Cixous in particular, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, and the postmodern critique of Linda Hutcheon, the article contends that Carter uses the trope of decapitation to link beheading to loss of agency and thus to serve her project of exposing violent patriarchal and sexual structures. She utilizes decapitation to interrogate female inferiority and project its castrating impact on those women who are threatened with this punishment. Decapitation, however, becomes a means of undermining patriarchal logic from within since Carter reverses its targets and logic just as she does with castration. Carter’s act of conflating castration and decapitation and unsettling their connotations revises power structures and challenges attributing castration to men and decapitation to women, offering a postmodern critique of patriarchal fixities, oppressive boundaries, and negative gender constructions imposed on women.

The visitor : Roald Dahl on phobic anxiety of infections and delusion of hygiene

In his both highly amusing and thrilling story Roald Dahl describes an adventure of his fictive uncle Oswald Hendryk Cornelius, asnobby Englishman and womanizer, suffering from delusional anxiety of infections and hygienic compulsions. Forced by the breakdown of his car in the Sinai desert, he accepts the invitation of anoble Arab to spend the night in his palace, situated like amirage in the middle of the desert. Oswald is plagued by erotic obsessions at the sight of the beautiful wife as well as the likewise beautiful daughter. The night rewards him with the desired amorous adventure but without knowing with whom he had spent the night. Oswald's satisfaction changes to pure horror when, the next morning, the owner of the house reveals that the visitor during the night was neither his wife nor daughter.

Our unexpected ride.

Life was on track just as we had planned: two university jobs, with tenure for Andrew and a clear path toward a tenure-track position for Yssa (check); the purchase of our first home (check); and three beautiful daughters (check). But 3 months after our youngest daughter Marie was born, she started to have seizures. After a terrifying ambulance ride and a nerve-wracking week in a children's hospital, Marie was diagnosed with ring chromosome 14 syndrome, an exceedingly rare and debilitating condition caused when the 14th chromosome is fused into a ring. Life for our family was about to switch tracks, and we were along for the ride but no longer in control. ![][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “When Marie was born our smooth, straight ride … turned into a roller coaster.” Marie's seizures had no regard for class schedules or family time. We tried to keep up with our teaching duties, but it was difficult to lecture knowing that our young daughter could have a life-threatening seizure at any moment. Neither of us wanted to give up our academic career—and we didn't want the other to have to, either. But rigid teaching schedules proved untenable, especially when coupled with the other stresses of academic life, and we needed more flexibility. The reality was that Andrew was tenured, with the associated job security, and Yssa had applied mathematics expertise that made her more marketable outside academia. After discussing our options, we decided that Yssa would forgo her academic appointment. She obtained a part-time research position in industry, which required fewer hours for equivalent pay and allowed her to work from home when needed. She also started a nonprofit organization for families and researchers interested in ring 14. Our lives were still complicated—including multiple therapy sessions each week plus specialized, expensive child care—but it seemed we had found a way forward. We made this arrangement work for many years. But as our older daughters approached college age, we needed to re-evaluate our situation again. They had matured into fantastic caregivers, and their departure would have a huge impact on their sister and on us. Marie's seizures continued unabated, she was hospitalized regularly, and new concerns were looming as she approached adolescence. Facing numerous surgeries and complex long-term care, we struggled to achieve the elusive work-life balance and needed more support than well-meaning friends could offer. So, 5 years ago, we moved from Indiana to our native Texas, where most of our extended family resides. We developed a plan to sell the move to Andrew's department head and dean: He'd take a 1-year sabbatical at 50% pay while spending the other half of his time working in an unrelated family business. That way we could give an in absentia appointment a try. The administrators were understandably skeptical at first, but they agreed to a trial run. The first year of Andrew's “sabbatical” ultimately proved successful, so he resigned from the family business and returned full-time to his faculty role—buoyed by the support of empathetic students, colleagues, and administrators. He spends about 1 week per month on campus and continues to teach, maintain a research lab, and serve on myriad committees. It's often difficult, as Andrew sometimes struggles to arrange online access to meetings and he misses having colleagues down the hall. But so far it has been tenable. By helping us find a better work-life balance, the arrangement has also allowed Yssa to continue her work, which is now fully focused on running national and international ring 14 nonprofits. Yssa misses many aspects of her prior professional life, most of all the students. However, she finds intellectual stimulation and reward in working with parents and physicians to push medicine forward and help families become their own advocates. When Marie was born our smooth, straight ride unexpectedly turned into a roller coaster, with many joys but also with some poignant regrets. Ultimately, though, we are fortunate in many ways: wonderful children, a strong marriage, and rewarding work aided by a university that accommodates our whole family's needs. [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Women’s Reactions to Men’s Patriarchal Oppressions in Selected Ghanaian Male and Female Novels

Social imbalances between men and women are the bedrock of injustices women encounter in the world, particularly in African societies. Patriarchy is identified by womanist and feminist scholars as one of the social practices that give men more privilege and maintain women in peripheral roles. This article examines how female characters in African patriarchal settings of two Ghanaian male and female novels, Asare Adei’s A Beautiful Daughter (2012) and Amma Darko’s The Housemaid (1998) have been able to face/cope with men’s oppressions through womanist and radical feminist theories. The findings have revealed that majority of the female characters are empowered economically and socially in the male and female fictional texts, and this has enabled them to combat men’s patriarchal oppressions. The female characters’ reactions vary from one another. Some of them made use of pacific ways such as dialogue, feminine solidarity or sisterhood in their attempts to address men’s patriarchal oppressions, while others have made use of violence against men and children in their quest for justice and equality.

Croatian Historical and Etiological Tales about Illyrian Queen Teuta

King Agron, the unifier of the Illyrian lands, died in the year 231 B.C. and was inherited by his wife Teuta. Through time people have woven tales about queen Teuta that are told even nowadays. Teuta is said to be the most beautiful queen and daughter of a medicine woman from Narona. According to tales, Teuta resided on Šolta, in Dol on Hvar, on Svetac near Vis (once called the island of St. Andrew), in Jezero near Jajce, Borak near Široki Brijeg and in Risan in the Bay of Kotor. She soon came in conflict with the Romans and was defeated. Illyrian military commander Demetrius of Pharos disobeyed Teuta and sided with the Romans. According to the tales from Vis, Teuta, not being able to stand watching the Romans pillage her kingdom, ended her life on Svetac by jumping out of her fort. In the Bay of Kotor and other parts of Montenegro it is told that Teuta jumped from a cliff above Risan. The paper cites and interprets about forty historical and etiological tales which were recorded from 2001 to 2017. The tales were originally recorded in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

African social appraisals of women’s liberal and radical feminism in selected contemporary West and Central African female and male novels

Women, particularly in Africa, need feminism so as to advocate for their rights in the patriarchal setting of African societies. But the fact that some women, under the umbrella of it abuse children, men, and even their fellow women are problematic in contemporary African novels. Liberal and radical feminisms are part and parcel of feminisms in championing women's rights. This article examines women's liberal and radical feminist stratagems with the lens of African social appraisals in giving an answer to the following question: what are the African social appraisals of women's liberal and radical feminist stratagems in their quests for women's rights? Or what do the stratagems applied by liberal and radical feminists lead women to in contemporary African societies?n Through liberal and radical feminist readings of selected contemporary African male and female writings such as Amma Darko's The Housemaid (1998), Daniel Mengara's Mema (2003), Asare Adei's A Beautiful Daughter (2012), and Lola Shoneyin's The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (2010), we have examined how women with liberal/radical feminism are treated and considered in African patriarchal setting. In short, the result shows that African women need a feminism that gives way for consistent dialogue and which goes in line with non-violent stratagems like the one of liberal feminism in their quest for women's rights. The contrary, as in radicalism via violence against children, men or women, leads to men's violence on women, isolation of women and humiliation of women in contemporary African societies. The position of the contemporary African female and male novels, we have worked on proves that violent stratagems adopted by African feminists in advocating for women's rights should be reconsidered so as to assure the respect for human rights and take into account the socio-cultural realities of African societies.

Ariosto, Opera, and the 17th Century: Evolution in the Poetics of Delight by Edward Milton Anderson

Reviewed by: Ariosto, Opera, and the 17th Century: Evolution in the Poetics of Delight by Edward Milton Anderson Colin Timms Ariosto, Opera, and the 17th Century: Evolution in the Poetics of Delight., by. Edward Milton Anderson. By Edward Milton Anderson. (Historiae Musicae Cultores, cxxiii.) Appendice documentaria su CD-ROM, Nicola Badolato in collaboration with Amyrose McCue Gill. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2017 [xii, 280 p. ISBN 978-8-82226-501-2. £32 This is an original, informative and fascinating book on a large and important subject—the corpus of seventeenth-century Italian dramatic texts, mostly opera librettos, based on Orlando furioso, and what those texts reveal about the development of Italian opera during its first hundred years. Orlando furioso is the masterpiece of Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), one of the greatest Italian poets of all time and the illustrious precursor of Torquato Tasso (1544–95) and his Gerusalemme liberata. The title character is the medieval Frankish paladin Roland (died 778), his "fury" the frenzy or madness induced by his obsessive but unrequited infatuation with Angelica, the beautiful daughter of the king of Cathay who married the African soldier Medoro. The poem tells of Orlando's superhuman exploits in war and in love, and of his travels across Europe and beyond. Over the course of its forty-six cantos—38,736 lines in 4,842 stanzas of ottava rima (eight lines of eleven syllables)—this monumental epic also recounts the adventures of, for example, Alcina, Ariodante, Atalante, Bireno, Bradamante, Ginevra, Olimpia, Rinaldo, Rodomonte, and Ruggiero, ranges over a vast geographical area and probes almost every corner of human experience. First published in 1516, Orlando furioso had, by the end of the sixteenth century, achieved over 150 Italian editions and been translated into French and English. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the following two centuries it furnished material for musico-dramatic works by many composers, including Marco da Gagliano, Francesca Caccini, Luigi Rossi, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, Giovanni Alberto Ristori, Carlo Francesco Pollarolo, Vivaldi, Handel, Leonardo Leo, Wagenseil, Graun, Paisiello, Hasse, and Haydn. Some librettists supplied their own ending to the story of Angelica, which Ariosto had deliberately left incomplete ("forse altri canterà con miglior plettro"), but most went in other directions. Edward Milton Anderson (1966–2013) was an American scholar, a historian of Italian literature with interests also in music and art. His book is not the first attempt to trace the use of Ariosto in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, or eighteenth-century vocal music. Most well-known, perhaps, are Tim Carter's lists of works based on Ariosto and Tasso in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992), but a start on both poets had already been made by Alfred Einstein in his article "Orlando Furioso and La Geru-salemme Liberata: As Set to Music during the 16th and 17th Centuries" (Notes 8, no. 4 [September 1951]: 623–30). Ariosto in music was subsequently explored by Renate Döring (1973), Maria Antonella Balsano and James Haar (1981), and Irène Mamczarz (1983), with Balsano and Thomas Walker (1988) conducting further research into the contribution of Tasso. Stefano Tomassini's 110-page study—"Un 'Orlando' novissimo: Ripresi teatrali, melodrammi e intermezzi dal Cinquecento al Settecento", in Lina Bolzoni, et al. (eds.), L'"Orlando furioso" nello specchio delle immagini (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 2014)—appeared too late for the author of the book being reviewed. Anderson was fortunate, however, in being able to draw on Claudio Sartori's catalogue of Italian opera librettos, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici, 7 vols. (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1990–1994). His debt to Sartori is clear from his two appendices providing lists of Italian dramatic texts inspired by Ariosto, the first devoted to the seventeenth century, the second to the eighteenth. Appendix A includes forty-three works, compared with twenty-one in Grove Opera. The difference is explained by a variety of factors: Anderson's list includes manuscript as well as printed texts, items intended for music but not set, and works other than opera librettos—including a prologue that was printed in a larger collection, a favola maritima (Sebastiano Martini...

Modalitas Calon Bupati Dalam Pemilihan Umum Kepala Daerah Tahun 2015

In the history of political contestation in South Sulawesi as the election, there has never been a woman who has won an election. Moreover, the female candidate is a newcomer in the constituency, while his political opponents in the election are the incumbent. an incumbent is considered to have a greater opportunity than the other candidates, because it is considered to have more capital as the level of popularity and figuritas. Women in the political contest would also have the same opportunities as other candidates, although the participation of women in a political contest still an issue - an issue that marginalize women. It still can be minimized depending on how the power of modality which is owned by the candidates, in which a candidate must have akumalasi more capital so as to win a dispute. This study aimed to analyze and learn how modality which is owned by the candidates in the administration of the election, studies in Indah Putri Indriani as regent elected in the district of North Luwu, South Sulawesi Province Year 2015. The method in this research is qualitative research. The technique of collecting data through interviews and documentation. The results of this study found four dominant modality owned by Lovely Daughter Indriani compared to the incumbent candidate. The modality is social capital, cultural, political and economic. This proves that the beautiful daughter Indriani as a woman and also newcomers are able to accumulate the capital it has, so it managed to win a political contest and also became the first female Regent in South Sulawesi.

Warren, Eliot, Dante, and the Promises of Tradition

Warren, Eliot, Dante, and the Promises of Tradition Ryan Wilson (bio) Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. —Vergil, Georgica iii, 284–85 In the mid-to-late 1950s a number of young American poets published major books that departed aesthetically from the poetry of high modernism. These well-known books—Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), Ashbery’s Some Trees (1957), Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959)—established the individuality of the poets and marked a significant break with the poetry of the previous few decades. In this period, which saw the rise of beat poetry and confessional poetry as well as the ascendancy of the New York and Black Mountain schools, questions about what poetry was, and about what it could be, incited a goodly amount of debate. And while—amidst debates about “Pale-Faces” and “Redskins,” or about the “Cooked” and the “Raw”—a number of poets from the old guard, such as Eliot, Ransom, and Tate, all but abandoned writing poetry, Ransom’s and Tate’s former Vanderbilt colleague, Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of poems, Promises (1957), his best to date and perhaps the most complete and unified of all his collections. While the books by Lowell, Snodgrass, Ginsberg, and Ashbery are very fine indeed, one might argue that, of all the books published in this period, Promises is the one that best serves young poets of our time as an example of how to negotiate the past and the present, the tradition and the individual. After the publication of his Selected Poems in 1943, in which Warren published “The Ballad of Billie Potts”—a long, brilliant, and sometimes cumbersome poem attempting to blend the frontier dialect of Kentucky, a folk-tale, and lofty philosophical ruminations—he ceased to write poetry for nearly a decade. And then the poems returned, as Warren recounts in the New York Times Book Review: Suddenly, came a long joyous period in which the very air seemed full of promise. I found myself living in a stunningly beautiful spot, a great, not really ruinous, deeply moated Renaissance fortress, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean on three sides, with a mountain in the distance, and there, on those ages-old bloody-soaked stones stood my beautiful golden-haired baby daughter and her mother. So poems began again—a different kind, of the glittering [End Page 136] present and of, often, vivid moments of the past newly discovered. And the core rhythms were different. Even aimless mutterings with which a poem might first stir sounded different. Building on the technical innovations of “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” and on the philosophical conclusions drawn in the early novels like Night Rider and All the King’s Men, Promises appeared in 1957 as a significant departure for the already established poet. Anthony Hecht claimed in the Kenyon Review that the work was “different in intention and effect from the work of any poet [he] could think of.” In a contemporaneous review James Wright claimed Warren’s new book “deliberately shed the armor of competence—a finely meshed and expensive armor, forged at heaven knows how many bitter intellectual fires—and [went] out to fight with the ungovernable tide.” Indeed both the initial fanfare surrounding the book and the subsequent critical discussions of it have focused on what Charles Bohner describes as the book’s “variance with the crabbed intellectuality” of Warren’s previous volumes, and on Warren’s turn against what Louis Rubin called the “lapidary techniques that would avoid all flaws and imperfections.” Rightly so. The poems are different: the meters looser, the content overtly autobiographical. Moreover we should emphasize that the poetry’s blend of autobiography and allegory preceded and adumbrated Lowell’s Life Studies and subsequent volumes from Plath, Sexton, etc. No doubt, then, critical comments like those made by Hecht and Wright are valuable for their recognition of Warren’s technical, and perhaps spiritual, breakthroughs. Such criticism, however, is very much of its time in its focus on the new and different. What it fails to address, or does not address satisfactorily, is the significance of what Promises retains from the...

Wonder Tale

Wonder Tale Rochelle Smith (bio) A decade ago my younger sister Natalie sent me an email message titled, “A Black Princess.” It was about a woman named Angela Brown who had married Maximilian of Liechtenstein and become Her Serene Highness Princess Angela, the only princess of African descent in a reigning European dynasty. I still have the email. Natalie, my pajama-clad co-spectator when Charles and Diana had wed, forwarded to me with no message appended; apparently, its significance was so clear that comment was unnecessary. There was a link to a picture of the bride and groom leaving the church in which they’d been married: she was wearing a gown she had designed herself and a tiara previously worn by several other royal brides in the family. She was from Panama originally, like my old college roommate, and was a few days shy of forty-two. Looking at this picture I felt happy, obscurely buoyed. Princesses. Real or imaginary, why should they matter to me? Snow White, Maid Maleen, the Sleeping Beauty, the Goose Girl—I doted on these stories long before I knew Disney versions existed. I read them as a child in the Ladybird books that were published in England and sold in Trinidad, with their red-backed cardboard covers and their simple layouts: text on the left page, illustration on the right. I remember marveling that someone could paint satin, as on Cinderella’s three gowns, that looked so liquid and so real. I can still see the sticky shine of gold on Rumpelstiltskin’s bobbins. When I was eight a cousin handed me down a yellow gauze dress. It was 1976, and folkloric styles were popular: the dress had long full sleeves that gathered into embroidered cuffs, with matching embroidery at the neck and waist. This dress was an immediate favorite. I especially loved wearing it when I was sewing. My grandmother had taught me to hand-sew years before, and I would make myself floppy-necked cotton bears with button eyes and then make little gingham dresses for them. As I sat sewing I pretended I was Snow White’s mother. The scene was sparkling clear in my mind: she at the ebony-framed window looking pensively down at the snow outside the castle, in her inattention letting the needle slip and pierce her finger. What had she been making? She wished for a child of black, white, red. She never specified white skin, black hair, red lips. In that liminal moment before the turning of the page anything could have been, the three colors shuffled any number of ways. Ebony skin, white fingernail tips, red—what? The story is surreally unclear. She could have come out checkerboard, or plaid. They could have been meant symbolically—they were the colors of the Trinidad and Tobago flag, my flag, black for strength, red for warmth, white for purity and the cradling sea. For that one paragraph, that eyelash’s weight of time before the next page’s image of the young princess is revealed, everything is possible. [End Page 531] This then, is about pictures as much as words. Few of us since the 1800s have had the privilege of forming fairy tales entirely in our own minds. Someone steps in to supply the pictures for us: Arthur Rackham, Wanda Gág, Eric Winter, Trina Schart Hyman, countless unknown artists. The descriptive minimalism of folk and fairy tales is well known: they will say that a queen is beautiful, that a castle is old, that a wet girl is given twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds to sleep on. But it is the pictures that manifest the crumbling stone walls, the bed linens heaped to the ceiling, the pale skin that such beauty means. African folktales have been compiled and published in the West for well over a hundred years. “Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,” for example, a retelling of a Kind and Unkind Girls tale from Zimbabwe originally collected by George Theal in his 1882 Kaffir Folk-Lore, has been hugely popular since it was first published in picture book form in 1987. But despite this trove of stories from which to draw, writers...

Reinventing the Legend of King Roderick: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Egilona

This article explores the little-known play Egilona written in 1845 by the talented Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, renowned for her poetry, novels and letters yet virtually unrecognized as a playwright. The play’s source of inspiration is the legend of King Roderick and La Cava, in which the last Visigothic king of Spain’s passion for the beautiful daughter of Count Julian, his governor in Ceuta, was deemed to have precipitated the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711. Gómez de Avellaneda joins three other women writers from different eras, Mary Pix, María Rosa Gálvez and Dana Broccoli, who all found literary inspiration in the Hispanic king’s dramatic love affair. Yet the great originality of Avellaneda’s drama lies in her innovative creation of the tragic figure of Egilona, the wronged wife of King Roderick, never before depicted as a protagonist in the reception of the legend. Its dramatic plot uncovers the complex issues of racial and religious marginalization which also characterize Avellaneda’s prose works, as the depiction of her heroine boldly challenges issues of patriarchy and politics, as pressing in the mid nineteenth-century as they were in the early Middle Ages.

Chitra Banerjee’s empathetic view of Draupadi as a protagonist in The Palace of Illusion

It is said that “Whatever is here is found elsewhere. But whatever is not here is nowhere else.” These lines are said for the great epic of India The Mahabharata. The name means “great [story of the] Bharatas.” Bharata was an early ancestor of both the Pandavas and Kauravas who fought each other in a great war, but the word is also used for the Indian race, so the Mahabharata Sometimes is referred to as “the great story of India.” The portrayals of women Characters in this epic were left unsatisfied. It wasn’t as though the epic didn’t have powerful, complex women Characters that affected the action in major ways, for instance, there was the widowed Kunti, mother of Pandavas,who dedicates her life to making sure her sons become kings. There was Gandhari, wife of the sightless Kaurava king, who chooses to blindfold her in marriage, thus relinquishing her power as queen and mother. And most of all, there was Panchali, king Drupad’s beautiful daughter, who has the unique distinction of being married to five men at the same time-the five Pandava brothers, the greatest heroes of their time. Panchaali who, some might argue, by her headstrong actions helps to bring about the destruction of the third Age of man. But in some way, they remained shadowy figures, their thoughts and motives mysterious, their emotions portrayed only when they affected the lives of the male heroes, their roles ultimately subservient to those of their fathers or husbands, brothers or sons. Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly Magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandava brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale.

By the rivers of water: a nineteenth-century Atlantic odyssey

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a strange seventeen year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths. Along the way they encountered not only many diverse landscapes, peoples, and cultures, but also many individuals on their own odysseys--including Paul Sansay, a former slave from Savannah; Mworeh Mah, a brilliant Grebo leader, and his beautiful daughter, Mary Clealand, at Cape Palmas; and King Glass and the wise and humorous Toko in Gabon. Leighton and Jane Wilson had freed their inherited slaves, and were to become the most influential American missionaries in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. While Jane established schools, Leighton fought the international slave trade and the imperialism of colonization. He translated portions of the Bible into Grebo and Mpongwe and thereby helped to lay the foundation for the emergence of an indigenous African Christianity. The Wilsons returned to New York because of ill health, but their odyssey was not over. Living in the booming American metropolis, the Wilsons welcomed into their handsome home visitors from around the world as they worked for the rapidly expanding Protestant mission movement. As the Civil War approached, however, they heard the siren voice of their Southern homeland calling from deep within their memories. They sought to resist its seductions, but the call became more insistent and, finally, irresistible. In spite of their years of fighting slavery, they gave themselves to a history and a people committed to maintaining slavery and its deep oppression--both an act of deep love for a place and people, and the desertion of a moral vision. A sweeping transatlantic story of good intentions and bitter consequences, By the Rivers of Water reveals two distant worlds linked by deep faiths.

Experiencing Reality through Cookbooks: How Cookbooks Shape and Reveal Our Identities

Experiencing Reality through Cookbooks: How Cookbooks Shape and Reveal Our Identities

Philosemitism and the mission civilisatrice in Gautier's La Juive de Constantine

Theophile Gautier's play La Juive de Constantine was not a success. Cowritten with Noel Parfait, (1) the play opened at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theater on November 12, 1846 and closed after a mere 20 performances. (2) Reviewers seemed to take a perverse pleasure in attacking one of their own, devoting uncharacteristically long articles to skewering the play after lamenting how sorry they were to do so: Certes j'aurais ete heureux de raconter le succes [...] de cette soiree, wrote the legendary critic Jules Jan in in the Journal des debats: mais en presence de ces huees, de ces cris, de cet ennui [...] en presence de cette action noire, plate, et sans genie [...] il faut bien etre vrai avec nos deux confreres, si nous voulons conserver le droit d'etre justes et sinceres avec tout le monde. (3) So awful did the critic for Le Constitutionnel find the play that he sarcastically suggests it must have been written not by Gautier at all but rather by the Algerian rebel Abd El-Kader in order to discourage the French from further colonization by boring them to tears. (4) It is tempting to follow these critics in dismissing the play as a badly constructed compendium of cultural cliches and threadbare theatrical conventions. In what follows, however, I want to suggest that despite its dramatic shortcomings, La Juive de Constantine merits closer attention for the insights it provides into the ideology of the French colonial endeavor at a key historical moment. For we find here, amid the cliches and conventions, a roadmap to what would become France's strategy in managing the indigenous population of Muslims and Jews in Algeria. Twenty-five years before the Cremieux Decree would enfranchise Algeria's Jews while continuing to consign Muslims to second-class status, the play articulates a rationale for this hierarchy based on the relative capacity of these groups to assimilate French legal norms. As Joshua Shreier has recently argued, Algeria served as a crucible for the development of France's civilizing mission, the justification of colonization on moral grounds that would come to dominate French colonial policy during the Third Republic. (5) Gautier's play provides a remarkably prescient formulation of this ideology, one that lays bare its political and social stakes, as well as its racializing logic, with instructive clarity. First, a short summary of the rather complicated action of the play. The curtain opens on the eastern Algerian city of Constantine dans les deux premieres annees de l'occupation francaise. (6) At the start of the play, Dominique, a French soldier, is keeping watch on the shop of a Jewish merchant named Nathan for his superior officer, Maurice d'Harvieres, who is in love with the Jew's beautiful daughter, Lea. Maurice and Lea plot to run off to France to get married, but their plans are foiled when a Muslim woman, Kadidja, who is in love with Maurice, betrays their intentions to Lea's father, Nathan. When Nathan confronts his daughter about her illicit love for the Frenchman, she reveals that she has already converted to Christianity. A rabbinical scholar in addition to being a merchant, Nathan knows that the Talmud commands him to treat his apostate daughter as if she has died or face the censure of the Jewish community. But the wily Jew concocts a plan: he will give Lea a sleeping draught in order to fake her death, allowing her to escape with Maurice and save his honor. (7) At the start of the third act, Maurice has been captured by Ben Aissa, the brother of Kadidjah, who is also in love with Lea. The jealous Ben Aissa wants to kill Maurice, but then hears that the belle juive they both love is dead. Kadidjah arranges for Maurice to escape. Act Four takes place at the Jewish cemetery as Nathan frees his daughter from her tomb and bids her farewell, refusing her entreaties to join her and her Christian lover in France. Both Maurice and Ben Aissa come to the cemetery to see Lea's grave for themselves, and discover she is in fact still alive. …