Simultaneously challenging conventional male-dominated thought and revisionist modern feminism, this book argues that gendered identities can best be conceived relationally, and thus that a fuller understanding of gender roles in the eighteenth century (and by extension in our own) must include an analysis of men’s place in the discourse of domesticity. Examining the phenomenal rise of the social periodical at the end of the seventeenth century, the author theorizes the genre’s crucial contribution to the construction of a class-specific gender identity that succeeds as ideology not, as usually assumed, by separating the feminine private sphere from the masculine public one, but by delineating the private as an important locus of masculine control. Marshalling social history, political theory, economics, and sociology in an attempt to account historically for the appearance of the sentimental family—controlled by the man who is at once lover and husband, father and brother—this book forcefully questions the validity of the doctrine of separate spheres and the ascription of gender roles connected to it. The social periodical provides compelling evidence for understanding the relationship between gender construction and class values. By focusing on such topics as courtship, marriage, and parent-child relations, the genre configured the nuclear family as a locus where emotional and sexual gratification supported material gain. Periodical literature offered an ostensibly neutral forum for public debate about private issues where male editors, by instructing and reforming women, also learned to become the chaste husbands and watchful fathers of the bourgeois home. In the process of demonstrating how social periodicals constructed new forms of masculine control still very much with us today, the book also shows how, by galvanizing an important new reading class, they contributed to the rise of the novel. Periodical literature exerted a transformative effect on English society by displaying a moral and cultural authority, not to mention a readership, that novels would struggle for many decades to achieve.

A lavish wedding marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture - romantic love and excessive consumption. This work offers a look at the historical, social and psychological strains that come together to make it the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture.

Katia’s father was evil. With her mother’s help, she’d escaped his home and learned to live on her own, hiding, her life revolving around secrecy so her father wouldn’t find her. Everything was fine, until the day Sergei walked into her coffee shop. In that moment, her life turned upside down. But she soon discovered that this tall, scary man with the scarred face wasn’t here to bring her back to her father. He was here to…marry her? Yes – a marriage to this man would stop her father’s cruelty. She had to do it! Katia wasn’t what Sergei was expecting. She was sweet and kind and beautiful…and stronger than he would have realized. Not to mention brilliant and creative. Together, they would stop her father. What he also hadn’t anticipated…falling in love with his enemy’s daughter.

How ought the church respond to the rise of a post-Christian secular age? Should it retreat? What is the mission of the church in this context? Joseph Ratzinger's eucharistic ecclesiology provides a model for living the relation between communion and mission, a model that provides a sound image for conceiving of and imagining the church's engagement with modernity and the embodiment of missionary communion. Ratzinger's vision, deeply influenced by St. Benedict's and St. Augustine's responses to the problems of their day, offers a theologically and liturgically grounded vision of missionary communion that transcends politics. In light of our creation by, from, and for the triune God, authentic responses to the present dis-integration of reason and community require the witness and invitation of the church as a community for the world. Ratzinger argues that right worship can and does habituate Christians and equip churches to respond to the existential questions confronting modern persons, many of whom seem partially paralyzed by the anxieties of life without truth and communion. Might the witness of communion for mission lived by the new ecclesial movements, especially the Focolare, offer an example of how Ratzinger's creative minorities can successfully evangelize this secular age?

All the writings of Plato generally considered to be authentic are here presented in the only complete one-volume Plato available in English. The editors set out to choose the contents of this collected edition from the work of the best British and American translators of the last 100 years, ranging from Jowett (1871) to scholars of the present day. The volume contains prefatory notes to each dialogue, by Edith Hamilton; an introductory essay on Plato's philosophy and writings, by Huntington Cairns; and a comprehensive index which seeks, by means of cross references, to assist the reader with the philosophical vocabulary of the different translators.

This sourcebook offers an introduction to Thomas Hardy's crucial novel, offering: a contextual overview, a chronology and reprinted contemporary documents, including a selection of Hardy's poems an overview of the book's early reception and recent critical fortunes, as well as a wide range of reprinted extracts from critical works key passages from the novel, reprinted with editorial comment and cross-referenced within the volume to contextual and critical documents suggestions for further reading and a list of relevant web resources. For students on a wide range of courses, this sourcebook offers the essential stepping-stone from a basic reading knowledge to an advanced understanding of Hardy's best-known novel.