In these pages, the problematic at the centre of the book is introduced. It explores how the concepts of sovereignty and freedom and the human/nature relationship are linked and how they influence the idea of self. This Introduction also displays past and current interpretations of the Romantic conception of subjectivity and of Romantic political philosophy, highlighting the shortcomings of these readings. Indeed, they neglect the political essence of the Romantic Self. This chapter closes with an overview of the structure of the book and a list of the Romantic authors considered.

This chapter is devoted to the Romantic women philosophers, and it groups their reflections on subjectivity. This chapter aims to identify a common thread that unites these women thinkers and contributes to the understanding of the Romantic Self. Despite the diversity of their perspectives, they shared a common understanding of the self as shaped by relationships with others and nature, and as incapable of imposing herself on them, a view that echoes arguments presented by the men philosophers of Romanticism. However, these women thinkers tend to focus on a particular point: the possibility for the self to create a space for her own voice and, on occasion, her actions. After the explanation of Sophie Mereau’s notion of agency, and the differences between her and Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s political thought, the chapter focuses on Mereau’s and de Staël’s interpretations of Fichte's philosophy and their idea of autonomy. The role of memory and love in Sophie Tieck's and Dorothea Veit’s conception of the self is then analysed. The chapter closes with Günderrode’s and Bettina von Arnim’s notion of subjectivity, and its relationship with nature and society.

To gain insight into the political meaning of the Romantic Self, it is essential to consider the relationship between subjectivity and nature on the one hand and the subject and the norms established within a community on the other. These two lines of inquiry converge in the examination of gender, specifically in the question of whether our sexual-biological identity, which constitutes our most nature-bound aspect, affects our subjectivity – that is to say, whether our mode of thinking, feeling, and relating to others is determined by our sexual identity. A consideration of Romantic reflections on gender will complete our investigation about the extent to which Romanticism regards the self as determined by nature or as independent from it. The first part of the chapter explains the meaning of the word Geschlecht (‘gender’ or ‘sex’) in the German philosophical debate at the end of the eighteenth century. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the role played by women within the Romantic ‘symphilosophy’. It closes with a focus on some Romantic women philosophers and their own idea on the role women should play in the cultural and philosophical debate.

This chapter discusses the Paleolithic and Neolithic, thus covering the vast majority of human history. It examines the more complex social structures and cultural forms that plant and animal domestication enabled, as the simple stone hand axes of the Paleolithic were replaced by more specialized tools, small kin groups gave way to ever larger villages, egalitarian foragers became stratified by gender distinctions and divisions of wealth and power, and spirits were transformed into hierarchies of divinities worshipped at permanent human-built structures. The basic social pattern set in early agricultural societies—with most people farming the land and a small elite who lived off their labor—was remarkably resilient, lasting well into the twentieth century for most of the world.

What did contemporary critics mean when they celebrated the usefulness of Maria Edgeworth’s fictions? And how did such praise affect her writing? Arguing for the significance of the tale mode in Edgeworth’s writing well into the first decade of the nineteenth-century, this chapter tracks the meanings of morality across a range of her writing, paying particular attention to its imperial contours. Close attention to her tale ‘To-Morrow’ (from Popular Tales, 1804) points to an experimental mode of imperial morality, characterized by adjustments, disruptions, and displacements, highly characteristic of Edgeworth’s writing up to about 1810. The chapter concludes by considering the longer legacy of this early inscription of the imperial and racialized geographies of use.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

This chapter introduces readers to the field of fashion and literature and explains how fashion has functioned as an influential but underrecognized concept and force in literary studies. It identifies key questions and concerns that have fueled work on fashion and literature for decades, including temporality, subjectivity, materiality, labor, genre, and style, and it locates the field at the intersection of literary studies, fashion studies, and material culture studies. The introduction also highlights the role that work on gender and sexuality, often in relation to race and colonialism, has played in research on fashion and literature, as well as the importance of women’s labor as a topic and factor in the field. It explains the organization of the volume, highlighting how various chapters address broader debates and point to emerging directions for scholarship.

Women’s mental health has been shaped by patriarchal societal biases in science, medicine and society. Early medical texts attributed women’s distress to their reproductive system or sexual deprivation. In the Middle Ages, mental illness was often misinterpreted as witchcraft, reinforcing harmful beliefs about female autonomy, and in the nineteenth century, male-dominated medical science pathologised women’s independence with diagnoses such as ‘moral insanity’ to justify institutionalising women who defied social norms. Twentieth-century feminism underpinned advances in medicine and social reform, shaping health policy and psychiatric practice, although controversies around research into hormone replacement therapy (HRT) disrupted momentum. Despite progress, persistent gender bias in research and access to mental health care persists, particularly for marginalised groups, although initiatives like the Women’s Health Strategy offer hope for a more equitable future.

Chapter 5 explores women’s substantive representation in the MENA. Whereas most previous studies have focused predominantly on what portfolios female politicians have been offered, the analysis here centres on which policy areas female parliamentarians in the MENA have pursued with a view to uncover the factors behind such choices. In other words, do female parliamentarians pursue portfolio areas based on their own gender and the presumed gendering of the portfolio area? According to their own experiences, does the number of women in parliament, women’s status in politics and women in central positions within the party leadership play a role in what policy areas they themselves pursue and are offered? Do they think the electoral system plays a role and, if yes, how? Are they attracted to the climate (or environment) portfolio? And what role do factors such as geography, qualifications and expertise play?

This chapter considers three significant New Negro Renaissance poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anne Spencer, and analyzes how they discussed themes of racism and gender inequality in their poetry. Although the critics of their day dismissed their poetry as raceless and apolitical, this chapter demonstrates how New Negro women writers utilized the domestic sphere of writing and wrote poetry that allowed them to articulate and explore their unspeakable desires. Black women poets were able to express their wholeness and sexual self-determination. Even though their writings may not have garnered critical acclaim and success, Black women writers were present and actively advancing Black feminist ideas. Extending the analysis of such scholars as Maureen Honey, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria T. Hull, this chapter illustrates that Black women writers fashioned a poetics that enabled them to discuss such subjects as sexuality and Black women’s right to autonomy and self-fashioned happiness. Their writings represent a profound yearning for freedom and sexual fulfillment, challenging the prevailing ideology that women’s primary realm of power was in the home.

No act better distilled the two faces of independence – its aspirations and disappointments – than the act of going to school. This chapter examines the expansion of schooling, and its inherent precarity, in the first decades after independence. Relying heavily on local sources and oral histories, this chapter focuses on the lived and affective experiences of students. It argues that repeated assurances by the state that schooling held the key to a better future consistently jarred with the experience of most school-goers. So palpable were these schooling pressures, that in the early 1960s, Western psychiatrists identified a new, regionally specific mental disorder, Brain Fag [fatigue] Syndrome, to account for the stress students experienced. The rapid, but uneven, expansion of schooling indicated who was excluded from the larger development project of the nation.

Focusing on the ‘keeping’ and ‘cure’ of frantic persons, Chapter 5 explores the ideational link between ‘reason’ and ‘rule’ which – in the minds of contemporaries – justified these interventions. If the ‘ruling faculties’ of the human mind were impaired, this merited the placement of the affected individual under the ‘rule’ of others. If the subject was an adult male, the result was a rapid and often chaotic reshuffling of power relations within the home and the wider community. Looking at how householders, parishioners, physicians, mayors, and local magistrates responded to frenzy, this chapter shows how the ideas explored in Chapters 1–3 changed the lives of those who received the diagnosis. It suggests that, if the high premium placed on the faculty of the ‘reason’ served to shore up the rigidly hierarchical order of social relations which obtained in early modern England (encompassing rank, age, gender, and species), frenzy exposed the fragility of that same order.

Whereas male poets such as Coleridge and Keats used the figure of the witch to explore the connections between the shapeshifting powers of the female demonic and (male) creativity, the third chapter reveals how women novelists like Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth remapped contemporary cultural anxieties in Britain surrounding witches and transgressive female energies onto the colonial landscape of Jamaica. These two authors position the female practitioners of Obeah as an intriguing alternative to the degradation of women in England and the enslaved populations in the colonies.

This chapter continues the discussion of eighteenth-century representations of Lady Macbeth as a monstrous wife and mother, examining how this was depicted in a series of paintings that portray Lady Macbeth as dominating and exerting control over her timid spouse. After the French Revolution, British caricaturists cast Jacobin sympathizers as the witches in Macbeth, and visual artists such as Johan Zoffany, Henry Fuseli and William Blake invoked the figure of the witch to fuel fears regarding dangerous female sexuality and the horrific consequences of giving women social and political power. Mary Wollstonecraft, who embodied these fears for Fuseli and Blake, along with Germaine de Staël and Sarah Siddons, responded by emphasizing the psychological elements of Macbeth and representing Lady Macbeth as a sympathetic character.

The Introduction situates Romanticism Bewitched within current historicist scholarship on gender and witchcraft, feminist political theory and recent scholarship on misogyny and women’s anger. In addition, it traces the trajectory of witchcraft belief from the seventeenth century down to the Romantic era, exploring the eighteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the gendered politics of representations of Lady Macbeth. During the Romantic period, Siddons’s powers of enchantment in that role, and the effect it had on her audience, is an example of how the figure of the Romantic witch opened a space to imagine and explore the constructive and destructive uses of female magic. While some Romantic witches confirmed the worst fears regarding female magic and its pernicious influence, other Romantic witches invited more positive reactions, ranging from sympathy to the deep admiration bordering on awe that Siddons inspired.

This chapter provides an analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s representation of contemporary female artists and authors like herself and Sarah Siddons as witches or enchantresses in “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” and offers examples of the wide variety of witches in Romantic-period Gothic literature, with sections on mother witches, political witches, marvelous witches, Faustian witches and serpent witches. Romantic-era Gothic writers discussed include well-known authors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Samuel Coleridge and Charlotte Dacre as well as lesser-known writers (at least to us now) such as Catherine Smith, Mary Julia Young and George Brewer.

This chapter reviews recent research on identity and second language (L2) learning. It begins with an introduction that highlights identity as fluid, complex and intersectional. It then outlines conceptual frameworks commonly adopted in this line of inquiry, including poststructuralism and sociocultural and critical approaches. The chapter then identifies categories in L2 learning, including heritage and multilingual learners, gender and sexual identities, racialized identities and socioeconomic class. In the review of heritage and multilingual learners, we highlight recent research on translanguaging that illustrates linguistic hybridity and complexities, as well as the works that challenge Eurocentric tendencies by focusing on multilingualism in the periphery. The section on gender and sexual identities discusses research on gender nonconformative L2 learners and sexual minorities. The review of the research on racialized identities provides an analysis of racism and coloniality as apparatuses and conditions of L2 learning. Finally, through our overview of the works on social class, we reflect on class not just as an external condition of language learning, but as an identity that shapes and is shaped by language learning. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions for identity and L2 learning.

This chapter examines the growing trend towards integration of gender considerations into international trade agreements. It analyses the rationale behind this trend, exploring both rights-based and economic efficiency-based arguments for promoting gender equality through trade. The chapter discusses various approaches to integrating gender provisions, including mainstreaming within functional chapters, as well as dedicated chapters, and highlights the variations in focus areas in particular agreements, ranging from economic empowerment to social concerns. It further categorises the roles of women addressed in these agreements, such as employees, decision-makers, mothers, and business stakeholders. The analysis reveals gaps in addressing critical issues like the informal sector and digital inclusion, and underscores the importance of enforceable provisions for effective implementation.