Engendering a Nation adopts a sophisticated feminist analysis to examine the place of gender in contesting representations of nationhood in early modern England. Plays featured include: * King John * Henry VI, Part I * Henry VI, Part II * Henry, Part III * Richard III * Richard II * Henry V. It will be a must for students and scholars interested in the cultural and social implications of Shakespeare today.

Dressy men as a type of celebrity have played a distinctive part in the cultural - and even in the political - life of Britain over several centuries. But unlike the twenty-first-century hipster, the dandies of the British past provoked intense degrees of fascination and horror in their homeland and played an important role in British society from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This book - illustrated with contemporary prints, portraits and caricatures - explores that social and cultural history through a focus on the macaroni, the dandy and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism and the third for his sexual perversity. All were highly controversial in their time, pioneering new ways of displaying and performing gender, as demonstrated by the impact of key figures such as Lord Hervey, George 'Beau' Brummell and Oscar Wilde. This groundbreaking study tells the scandalous story of fashionable men and their clothes as a reflection of changing attitudes not only to style but also to gender and sexuality.

What have poems and maps, law books and plays, ecclesiastical polemics and narratives of overseas exploration to do with one another? By most accounts, very little. They belong to different genres and have been appropriated by scholars in different disciplines. But, as Richard Helgerson shows in this ambitious and wide-ranging study, all were part of an extraordinary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century enterprise: the project of making England.

En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts—primarily novels—produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of "native" Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism. Through her readings of works by writers including Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, Harriet Martineau, Flora Annie Steel, Anita Desai, and Bapsi Sidhaa, Ray demonstrates that Indian women were presented as upper class and Hindu, an idealization that paradoxically served the needs of both colonial and nationalist discourses. The Indian nation’s goal of self-rule was expected to enable women’s full participation in private and public life. On the other hand, British colonial officials rendered themselves the protectors of passive Indian women against their “savage” male countrymen. Ray shows how the native woman thus became a symbol for both an incipient Indian nation and a fading British Empire. In addition, she reveals how the figure of the upper-class Hindu woman created divisions with the nationalist movement itself by underscoring caste, communal, and religious differences within the newly emerging state. As such, Ray’s study has important implications for discussions about nationalism, particularly those that address the concepts of identity and nationalism. Building on recent scholarship in feminism and postcolonial studies, En-Gendering India will be of interest to scholars in those fields as well as to specialists in nationalism and nation-building and in Victorian, colonial, and postcolonial literature and culture.

Engendering Ireland is a collection of ten essays showcasing the importance of gender in a variety of disciplines. These essays interrogate gender as a concept which encompasses both masculinity and femininity, and which permeates history and literature, culture and society in the modern period. The collection includes historical research which situates Irish women workers within an international economic context; textual analysis which sheds light on the effects of modernity on the home and rising female expectations in the post-war era; the rediscovery of significant Irish women modernists such as Mary Devenport O’Neill; and changing representations of masculinity, race, ethnicity and interculturalism in modern Irish theatre. Each of these ten essays provides a thought-provoking picture of the complex and hitherto unrecognised roles gender has played in Ireland over the last century. While each of these chapters offers a fresh perspective on familiar themes in Irish gender studies, they also illustrate the importance and relevance of gender studies to contemporary debates in Irish society.

Upon publication in 1997, The Norton Shakespeare set a new standard for teaching editions of Shakespeare's complete works.

Ueno (humanities and sociology, U. of Tokyo, Japan) explores interrelated issues of gender, war, history, and public memory. She first looks at Japanese women's support for aggressive war and their acceptance of the gender strategy for nationalizing women through mobilization. She next turns to the discursive battle over the Japanese treatment of