The Improbable Heroine

This is the first biography in English of a World War II heroine of the Greek resistance, who joined the British secret intelligence services (SIS) shortly after the German occupation of Athens and was betrayed, arrested and executed one month before the Germans’ departure. She was a prosperous housewife with seven children, who had no experience in politics or military affairs, and yet she managed to build a formidable escape, espionage and sabotage organization that interacted with the highest levels of SIS agents in Occupied Greece.

Revises established understandings of British women writers' contributions to Enlightenment narratives of social and historical progress Drawing on original archival research, A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process. By reading women's literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, JoEllen DeLucia challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. Beginning with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), she tracks discussions of "e;women's progress"e; from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, this study positions feminine genres such as the Gothic romance and Bluestocking poetry, usually seen as outliers in a masculine Age of Reason, as essential to understanding emotion's role in Enlightenment narratives of progress. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in women's literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion; and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use "e;women's progress"e; to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development.Key FeaturesEstablishes the centrality of gender to Enlightenment discussions of social and historical development Uncovers evidence of women writers' participation in the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of sentiment and historical progressProvides literary and historical background for ongoing discussions of the history of emotion and the study of affect

This Element examines women warriors as vehicles of mobilisation. It argues that women warrior figures from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War are best understood as examples of 'palimpsestic memory', as the way they were represented reflected new contexts while retaining traces of legendary models such as Joan of Arc, and of 'travelling memory', as their stories crossed geographical borders and were re-told and re-imagined. It considers both the instrumentalisation of women warriors by state actors to mobilise populations in the world wars, and by non-state actors in resistance, anti-colonial and feminist movements. Fell's analysis of a broad range of global conflicts helps us to understand who these actors were, what motivated them, and what meanings armed women embodied for them, enabling a fresh understanding of the woman warrior as an archetype in modern warfare.

His compassionate witness is born out of immersion in doggedly bittersweet particulars: the cock-eyed wisdom of 1950s science fiction movies; Do Not Disturb signs; vegetarian physics; the perils of bed-and-breakfast lodging; flying saucer disciples; what to do in case of Rapture; Debbie Fuller, reluctant childhood angel; the theory and practice of Spontaneous Human Combustion. His passionate transformation of that raw data into song - no matter how fragile or raucous - provides irrefutable testimony about the consequences of being nothing less than human, where "every day someone crawls out of his ocean of sleep / and takes those first tottering steps on the planet again / he's playing with real fire." And with Clewell's insistence on the unlikely grace in that condition, along with the generosity of his unabashed inclusiveness, his poetry is a powerful antidote to the bad medicine we're too often asked to swallow.

The previously unpublished memoir of social worker Charles Schermerhorn offers new and eye-opening source material pertaining to the epicenter of the early Cold War: northern Greece. This book brings this memoir to light to enrich the discussion about the Greek Civil War and the late 1940s, through the highly perceptive views of a firsthand observer of the turmoil. Schermerhorn’s writings speak most compellingly to the power of human agency amid adverse sociopolitical circumstances. His memoir takes a child-centered and social-historical approach to controversial events, filling a great void in our knowledge. This book looks at a single mid-twentieth-century crisis in multidimensional ways, as a moral, material, social, and institutional calamity that mobilized a motley crew of actors, from new humanitarian aid organizations to press agents, from soldiers to destitute repeat-refugees, from fledgling modern missionaries to foreign diplomats and economic strategists. It was Schermerhorn’s unique achievement to interact with them all, seeking common ground in the arduous task of trying to improve living conditions for children and rural families. But he also realized how easily foreign aid could become a tool of political power and expediency. Focusing on the Greek Civil War, this book will interest readers studying the Cold War, the heated peripheries of proxy wars, and the devastating social fallout of conflicts raging in areas hidden from public view. The global history of humanitarian crises is a burgeoning field, and Schermerhorn was the first to place Greek children and villagers, who themselves left hardly any sources behind, at the center of this urgent and ever-relevant debate.

Although Frances Hodgson Burnett published numerous works for an adult readership, she is mainly remembered today for three novels written for children: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). This volume is dedicated to The Secret Garden. The articles address a wide range of issues, including the representation of the garden in Burnett's novel in the context of cultural history; the relationship between the concept of nature and female identity; the idea of therapeutic places; the notion of redemptive children in The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy; the concept of male identity; constructions of 'Otherness' and the redefinition of Englishness; film and anime versions of Burnett's classic; Noel Streatfeild's The Painted Garden as a rewriting of The Secret Garden; attitudes towards food in children's classics and Burnett's novel in the context of Edwardian girlhood fiction and the tradition of the female novel of development.

While ghosts often inhabit films and literature devoted to the horror genre, a group of literature-based films from the 1930s and 1940s presents more human and romantic apparitions. These films provide the underpinnings for many of the gentle supernatural films of the 1990s. Tracing the links between specters as diverse as Rex Harrison's Captain Gregg and Patrick Swazye's Sam Wheat, the text presents the evolution of the cinematic-literary ghost from classic Gothic to the psychological, sociological, and political ideologies of today. Included are analyses of the literary and film versions of classic ghost stories--Wuthering Heights, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Portrait of Jennie, Letter from an Unknown Woman, The Uninvited, Liliom, and Our Town--as well as interpretations of modern films not based on literary works that show the influence of these predecessors--Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply. The text includes stills, a bibliography, and an index.

How does Dostoevsky’s fiction illuminate questions that are important to us today? What does the author have to say about memory and invention, the nature of evidence, and why we read? How did his readings of such writers as Rousseau, Maturin, and Dickens filter into his own novelistic consciousness? And what happens to a novel like Crime and Punishment when it is the subject of a classroom discussion or a conversation? In this original and wide-ranging book, Dostoevsky scholar Robin Feuer Miller approaches the author’s major works from a variety of angles and offers a new set of keys to understanding Dostoevsky’s world. Taking Dostoevsky’s own conversion as her point of departure, Miller explores themes of conversion and healing in his fiction, where spiritual and artistic transfigurations abound. She also addresses questions of literary influence, intertextuality, and the potency of what the author termed "ideas in the air.” For readers new to Dostoevsky’s writings as well as those deeply familiar with them, Miller offers lucid insights into his works and into their continuing power to engage readers in our own times.