Suchergebnisse

"Bernadette Andrea's groundbreaking study recovers and reinterprets the lives of women from the Islamic world who travelled, with varying degrees of volition, as slaves, captives, or trailing wives to Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."--. - "Andrea's thorough and insightful analysis of historical documents, visual records, and literary works focuses on five extraordinary women: Elen More and Lucy Negro, both from Islamic West Africa; Ipolita the Tartarian, a girl acquired from Islamic Central Asia; Teresa Sampsonia, a Circassian from the Safavid Empire; and Mariam Khanim, an Armenian from the Mughal Empire. By analysing these women's lives and their impact on the literary and cultural life of proto-colonial England, Andrea reveals that they are simultaneously significant constituents of the emerging Anglo-centric discourse of empire and cultural agents in their own right. The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture advances a methodology based on microhistory, cross-cultural feminist studies, and postcolonial approaches to the early modern period."--

InSpecters, her multi-genre novel-length work of life-writing, Radwa Ashour engages with the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky's theory of "enstrangement" or "defamiliarization" to explore how history shapes lives and lives shape history. The double-voiced narration andmise-en-abymestructure of the novel, a mirror-within-a-mirror plot layered with metafictional passages on writing, coheres through the motifs of ghosts, threads, and silences. These motifs bring to the fore, if only momentarily, those individuals whom history has effaced from the nineteenth century onwards. Ashour, who in her words seeks to construct a "geographical space dense with a resonant history, a composite of past and present, overlapping territories constitutive of an emotional and moral space for self-awareness and self-definition", engages the theory of enstrangement on both counts as she crafts a personal and political history that resists final closure and affirms life.