Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.

This chapter investigates the ways in which Percy and Mary Shelley engaged with the idea of witchcraft. In The Witch of Atlas Percy Shelley playfully poses the question: what if God (or Christ) was a witch with a sense of humor? Like her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other Romantic-era women, Mary Shelley was suspicious of representations of female magic. All her novels chronicle how women who have or pretend to possess power, supernatural or otherwise, are inevitably sidelined or written out of the narrative by the men they love and the collusion of the social and historical contexts in which they find themselves. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of her novel, Valperga, arguing that the introduction of the figure of the witch enables Shelley to finish the novel that she struggled with and to find a way to avenge the wrongs done to the other two female characters.

Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 3 stands apart from her other works by virtue of its mysterious dedication to the “Ignotae Deae”—a feminized version of the motto “Ignoto Deo”— that the Accademia degli Incogniti had borrowed from St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. Although seemingly affirming Strozzi’s links to the Incogniti, the enigmatic dedication also speaks to Strozzi’s ability in her music—both in this volume and elsewhere in her oeuvre—to dissimilate: to use music as means not of expressing her feelings but hiding them from her listeners. This hypothesis is born out in an overview of the volume’s organization, her choice of poems, and treatment of the poems that continually emphasize deception and deceit, where the musical setting often contradicts or even undermines the poem. In the end Strozzi herself emerges as the Unknown Goddess, who neutralizes even seemingly misogynist poems with deft humor, irony, always keeping her mask firmly in place.

This chapter chronicles a shift from the author’s earlier work on language identity, which was guided by post-structuralist thinking, to his more recent research informed by Marxist political economy, which has been guided by a version of critical realism based on Roy Bhaskar’s early, foundational publications. The chapter then examines how language and semiosis, key constructs in the author’s research, fit into Bhaskar’s three domains of reality – the real, the actual and the empirical – before moving to a language- and semiosis-based analysis of an excerpt from a podcast by the American, far-right social media figure, Nick Fuentes, the day after the 2024 presidential elections in the United States. This part of the chapter begins with a framing of Fuentes’s discourse as misogynist in nature. This is followed by a discussion of the excerpt as a communicative event, which leads into an explanation of how and why Fuentes says what he says in terms of deeper-level structuring mechanisms, focusing in particular on patriarchy and misogyny. The chapter ends with a brief conclusion which takes stock of all that has preceded it.

This chapter details the potential applications of corpus linguistic research in the study and mitigation of misogyny. The chapter begins by introducing the MANTRaP (Misogyny ANd The Red Pill) project and the work done in this project to examine language used across the online manosphere – a ‘loose online network’ of communities united by a shared anti-feminist ideology (Marwick and Caplan, 2018: 543). This chapter discusses findings from various studies conducted by project team members on corpora collected from online manosphere communities to examine, among other things, anti-feminist discourse and representations of gendered social actors. Following an overview of the academic work done by project team members, we then discuss practical applications and impacts of this research for the purposes of safeguarding children and young people from potential online harms. This discussion centres on various aspects of our work with a number of organisations involved in such safeguarding. In particular, our discussion centres on our contributions to the safeguarding efforts of these organisations through raising awareness with relevant stakeholders, producing and delivering safeguarding materials and training, and consultancy work for software companies providing safeguarding and monitoring solutions to schools. In the discussion, we also reflect on the formative work with non-academic stakeholders that leads to tangible impacts as well as the real-life implications of the applications emerging from this work. These include an increased public and academic focus on the communities researched and the language used in those communities and the use of research findings in safeguarding software designed for the online surveillance of children in schools.

The most enduring stereotypes about feminists is that they are manhaters. Interestingly, few empirical studies have examined this stereotype for its veracity. Chapter 4 critically examines the stereotype that feminists dislike men and that feminism is a movement against men. Social psychological research on women’s attitudes toward men is examined and finds that anti-feminists actually feel more hostility toward men than do feminists. The function and implication of the manhating feminist myth is critically examined in this chapter. The feminist manhater myth persists in order to undermine the feminist movement and to drive a wedge between traditional and non-traditional women. Related strategies to make feminism unpalatable, such as lesbian-baiting, are also critically examined. Chapter 4 ends with strategies to reduce the impact of the manhater stereotype and to foster gender equality. The empirical work measuring the effects of women/gender studies classes on students is presented, and teaching children about gender discrimination are some strategies presented.

This chapter investigates Archilochus’ relationship to the tradition of wisdom literature, using the poet as a case study for how we can think about inter-generic and intertextual relationships so early in the Greek literary tradition. Having established that Archilochus is familiar with (and expects his audience also to know) the conventions of didactic moralising, the chapter discusses the case for a stronger proposition: that his poetry demonstrates a specific relationship with the poems of Hesiod. The chapter examines some fragments which demonstrate the best case for an intertextual relationship (frr. 196a, 195, 177) and discusses how reading these through a Hesiodic lens enhances our understanding of what the poems aim to do and how they fit into Archilochus’ broader rhetorical strategy.

Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

Swift has often been labelled an outright misogynist. This chapter focuses on how several of Swift’s most misogynistic poems spoke to wider ideas about gender circulating in the early eighteenth century: in particular, the widespread concern that the idolisation of the female sex as paragons of virtue had lifted women well above their capacities in the name of beauty, morality, and social behaviour. The first section, on the idealisation of female virtue, includes an extended reading of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’, while the second section explores the links between cosmetics and scatology in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’.

This chapter examines works of Pirandello that feature the act of suicide against the backdrop of a historical epoch in which the issue of taking one’s own life was critical and culturally charged. Some of the suicides of the age were heroic self-immolators, as Carlo Michelstaedter appeared to many to be. Some were simply in desperate existential straits. Still others were women suffering intolerably in erotic relationships. The last two groups abound in Pirandello’s literary fictions, and he shares deep sympathy for them in approximately two dozen stories, many of which are analyzed closely here for their ethical and philosophical implications. Even more interesting “Pirandellian suicides” are symbolic ones, like Vitangelo Moscarda and Mattia Pascal in the novels. These characters reject, but do not end, the lives they have known before the narratives take their turns, producing the radical vitality of a non-life by bourgeois standards.

Chapter 8 retraces Ilf and Petrov’s businesslike investigation of the New York dreamworld of nightclubs, burlesque theaters, and other entertainments. Their exploration of American consumption and leisure provided them with a series of case studies that probed the line between the wholesome, “cultured” consumption promoted in the Soviet Union and capitalist vulgarity. Applying emerging Soviet understandings to the United States, Ilf and Petrov represented American men as often succumbing to the coarse charms of popular commercial spectacles; they associated American women with the obsessive consumption of vulgar things. Deploring women’s commodification under capitalism did not prevent men on the left, in the Soviet Union no less than in the United States, from representing women as “materialist viragoes.”

Eliminating cervical cancer is about more than just spending money. It requires reckoning with the many intangibles that get in the way of this cause. Widespread adherence to patriarchal value systems, for instance, not only threatens women’s health and well-being, but discourages them from freely pursuing the means to a cure. Persons with cervixes must confrontnot only archaic notions about their worth, but also many other hidden barriers to prevention. These include the fear and superstition that arise from lack of knowledge and medical misinformation, a lack of appreciation for self-care, the burden of unpaid work, and the vulnerability resulting from racial and gender inequality. Challenging these societal factors will increase the volume of women’s voices and ultimately save thousands of lives. But until society is ready to acknowledge and address these barriers – the patriarchal structures thwarting women’s autonomy and decision-making power, the stigma associated with this disease, the religious intolerances and traditional values contrary to its prevention – a cancer that strikes only those with a cervix will continue to kill.