Finally there is a book that speaks honestly about mans infidelities without blaming him, his wife or the other woman. This book doesnt pull any punches as to why men have extramarital relationship and why women stay with or leave them. Still, it manages to offer hope and insight for all parties involved. Wife Mistress Slave is the definitive source for proper etiquette, protocol and practical advice for all parties involved in a commited relationship and extra outside relationships. If you are married, thinking about marriage or involved with a married man, you must read this book.

Terry Castle's recent study of masquerade follows Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque to conclude that, for women, masquerade offered exciting possibilities for social and sexual freedom. Castle's interpretation conforms to the fears expressed by male writers during the period—Addison, Steele, and Fielding all insisted that masquerade allowed women to usurp the privileges of men. Female authors, however, often mistrusted these claims, perceiving that masquerade's apparent freedoms were frequently nothing more than sophisticated forms of oppression. Catherine Craft-Fairchild's work provides a useful corrective to Castle's treatment of masquerade. She argues that, in fictions by Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Frances Burney, masquerade is double-sided. It is represented in some cases as a disempowering capitulation to patriarchal strictures that posit female subordination. Often within the same text, however, masquerade is also depicted as an empowering defiance of the dominant norms for female behavior. Heroines who attempt to separate themselves from the image of womanhood they consciously construct escape victimization. In both cases, masquerade is the condition of femininity: gender in the woman's novel is constructed rather than essential. Craft-Fairchild examines the guises in which womanhood appears, analyzing the ways in which women writers both construct and deconstruct eighteenth-century cultural conceptions of femininity. She offers a careful and engaging textual analysis of both canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century texts, thereby setting lesser-read fictions into a critical dialogue with more widely known novels. Detailed readings are informed throughout by the ideas of current feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman. Instead of assuming that fictions about women were based on biological fact, Craft-Fairchild stresses the opposite: the domestic novel itself constructs the domestic woman.

The tragedies and tragicomedies of Thomas Middleton reflect the writer's earnest conviction of eternal verities concerning the condition of mankind. Like many Renaissance playwrights, Middleton is deeply conservative in his political, religious and moral ethics, and a survey of his themes is a sample of the thoughts of other Renaissance dramatists as well. His dramatic structures are precise and systematic and therefore susceptive to analysis; while peculiarly his own, they are, like his themes, typical of his time and place and thus open the working patterns of many of his predecessors and contemporaries to understanding as well.

This study examines different conceptions of time in Daniel Defoe's (1660-1731) novels. The temporal aspects of the novels are surveyed, taking into account the historical situation of the novel as a genre and contemporary conceptions of time. The modernisation process of the Western world serves as a wider context of the study, as present research indicates that Defoe's novels exemplify a multilayered shift from 'pre-modern' Western conceptions of time to those of the modern age. The author also explores gendered time and economic and cultural values of time in Defoe's novels. The book contributes a fresh analysis of Defoe's novels and demonstrates the crucial relation between historical-cultural conceptions of time and the historically changing genre of the novel.

Slavery was widespread throughout the Mediterranean lands where Christianity was born and developed. Though Christians were both slaves and slaveholders, there has been surprisingly little study of what early Christians thought about the realities of slavery. How did they reconcile slavery with the Gospel teachings of brotherhood and charity? Slaves were considered the sexual property of their owners: what was the status within the Church of enslaved women and young male slaves who were their owners' sexual playthings? Is there any reason to believe that Christians shied away from the use of corporal punishments so common among ancient slave owners? Jennifer A. Glancy brings a multilayered approach to these and many other issues, offering a comprehensive re-examination of the evidence pertaining to slavery in early Christianity. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Glancy situates early Christian slavery in its broader cultural setting. She argues that scholars have consistently underestimated the pervasive impact of slavery on the institutional structures, ideologies, and practices of the early churches and of individual Christians. The churches, she shows, grew to maturity with the assumption that slaveholding was the norm, and welcomed both slaves and slaveholders as members. Glancy draws attention to the importance of the body in the thought and practice of ancient slavery. To be a slave was to be a body subject to coercion and violation, with no rights to corporeal integrity or privacy. Even early Christians who held that true slavery was spiritual in nature relied, ultimately, on bodily metaphors to express this. Slavery, Glancy demonstrates, was an essential feature of both the physical and metaphysical worlds of early Christianity. The first book devoted to the early Christian ideology and practice of slavery, this work sheds new light on the world of the ancient Mediterranean and on the development of the early Church.