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This book examines early modern texts that portray Mary Tudor’s girlhood and betrothal to a foreign prince, her brief marriage to the aging king of France, and her untimely widowhood, as well as retrospective accounts that depict her life in France, her relationships with her husband and his heir apparent, and her surreptitious romance and clandestine marriage to an English duke. Here, texts from England are put into conversation with a significant body of work that was written in French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin, culminating in an examination of a novel from North America that passed itself off as a genuine sixteenth-century memoir. Author JoAnn DellaNeva also examines a spectrum of extra-literary texts—such as dialogues, popular songs, letters, speeches, portraiture, tapestries, fashion, jewelry, and book illuminations—for the ways they too helped shape Mary’s image. In so doing, she analyzes the intersection of history and literature, demonstrating how porous the borders between these disciplines can be. Through a series of close readings that are informed by an examination of the cultural context behind these texts, Imagining Mary Tudor, Queen of France seeks to explain how Mary’s fictional biography proved to be so slippery, vacillating between portrayals of her as a virtuous, generally powerless woman and as a wily and wicked minx.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.