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Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self. 

Poems that address cultural pressures placed on women and girls.
 
This is a book for those who were raised to be girls and expected to become women, for those who were told they were too girly and not girly enough, and for those who were ogled, talked over, touched, fed, imagined, and indoctrinated in ways they didn’t want. Angela Hume considers the persistent instructions to smile, be quiet, and act happy, all administered with the promise that this forced behavior would make everything better. The poems address rigid social norms and, ultimately, walk through the uncomfortable realizations about the bigger systems at play and call on us to examine our own complicity in them.
 

In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional couples emerged within the American radical Left. In Intimate Radicals, Ashley Walters tells the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men— such as Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and William English Walling, among other notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, and early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romances with revolutionary principles. The relationships captivated the public and became a source of intrigue, largely driven by the growth of human-interest journalism. Through individual biographies, historical narrative, and literary analysis, Walters reveals the cultural and political contingencies of desire.

 As Progressive Era radicals rebelled against the constraints of an earlier era, East European Jews—and Jewish women in particular— came to embody a new cosmopolitan ideal and European revolutionary spirit. Drawing on letters, newspapers, literature, and film, Walters shows how the public reception of these patrician-immigrant relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood. The men’s desire for East European Jewish women, she also points out, can be viewed as a form of “radical tourism,” in which men who enjoy a degree of privilege pursue an alluring Other in the hope of obtaining a more worldly identity.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

She was stabbed by her drunken husband on a storm-tossed ship in the North Atlantic. She forgave him before she died—and history never recorded her first name. Mrs. Whitlow, wife of a British soldier, is just one of the thousands of women who followed their husbands to war during the American Revolution. These women lived in the barracks and camps and endured the hardships of garrisons and campaigns in an unfamiliar and often hostile land. They faced the challenges with fortitude, proving themselves resourceful, industrious, and intrepid, but their involvement in the conflict that founded the United States has been largely lost to history. Incidents and brief mentions abound in the military writings and iconography of the era, but stories of individual lives are nearly nonexistent, which has caused this large population to be almost entirely overlooked. 

Combining archival research with deeply human storytelling, Invisible Lives: British Soldiers’ Wives in the American Revolution by Don N. Hagist brings together, for the first time, the myriad glimpses of these wives to tell the larger story of how they lived, worked, suffered, and survived as women in a foreign war. Drawing on court martial proceedings, muster rolls, marriage licenses, newspaper notices, and rare surviving letters, this meticulously researched work reconstructs the lives of women who were present in every theater of the Revolutionary War. What emerges is a portrait of remarkable resilience. These women crossed oceans, survived sieges, nursed the wounded, and raised children in the chaos of an eighteenth-century war. These many moments come together to provide a more complete and invaluable picture of British soldiers’ wives and their place in the army and the surrounding society. For readers of women’s history, military history, and the American Revolution, this is an overdue and deeply moving reckoning with the lives history had left behind.