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The idea of the woman writer in the Czech literary field of the first half of the 19th century was informed by the male mystifications of Czech women writers. In literary communication, their creators modelled female writers who never existed, invented their life stories and attributed to them the qualities they believed Czech women writers should possess. The first Czech circle of women patriots and writers then had to cope with this legacy. They used a variety of strategies to make their way: their debut collections of poems would refer to their fictional predecessors, they would work on the Czech encyclopaedia, combine writing with educational work, or smoke in public – the last of which was supposed to give the Czech author a George Sandian worldliness. To analyse their positions in the literary field of the first half of the 19th century, I use the term posture, which, following Alain Viala, the Swiss scholar Jérôme Meizoz understands as a unique way of taking a position in the literary field. In the context of history and language, the term posture has two dimensions: it is simultaneously defined as an act and as a discourse. On the one hand, it refers to self-representations within public discourses in literary situations, and on the other hand, it refers to the image itself given through discourse, which rhetoric refers to as ethos.

Eighteenth-century Spanish women were not idle bystanders during one of Europe's most dynamic eras. As Theresa Ann Smith skillfully demonstrates in this lively and absorbing book, Spanish intellectuals, calling for Spain to modernize its political, social, and economic institutions, brought the question of women's place to the forefront, as did women themselves. In explaining how both discourse and women's actions worked together to define women's roles in the nation, The Emerging Female Citizen not only illustrates the rising visibility of women, but also reveals the complex processes that led to women's relatively swift exit from most public institutions in the early 1800s. As artists, writers, and reformers, Spanish women took up pens, joined academies and economic societies, formed tertulias—similar to French salons—and became active in the burgeoning public discourse of Enlightenment. In analyzing the meaning of women's presence in diverse centers of Enlightenment, Smith offers a new interpretation of the dynamics among political discourse, social action, and gender ideologies.

Pinter’s short dramatic piece questions the women’s rights discourse that USA-led Western hegemonic powers rely heavily upon when justifying their incursions into the territories of the Global South. The play blasts this posture apart by pointing to the patriarchal paradigm and gendered hierarchies that inform the structuration of Western capitalist societies and which neo-imperial Western powers in their search for bigger profits and new markets inevitably transplant into annexed territories under their direct or indirect control.

The idea of the woman writer in the Czech literary field of the first half of the 19th century was informed by the male mystifications of Czech women writers. In literary communication, their creators modelled female writers who never existed, invented their life stories and attributed to them the qualities they believed Czech women writers should possess. The first Czech circle of women patriots and writers then had to cope with this legacy. They used a variety of strategies to make their way: their debut collections of poems would refer to their fictional predecessors, they would work on the Czech encyclopaedia, combine writing with educational work, or smoke in public – the last of which was supposed to give the Czech author a George Sandian worldliness. To analyse their positions in the literary field of the first half of the 19th century, I use the term posture, which, following Alain Viala, the Swiss scholar Jérôme Meizoz understands as a unique way of taking a position in the literary field. In the context of history and language, the term posture has two dimensions: it is simultaneously defined as an act and as a discourse. On the one hand, it refers to self-representations within public discourses in literary situations, and on the other hand, it refers to the image itself given through discourse, which rhetoric refers to as ethos.

On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation? Tribal Nationaddresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a \"maker of nations\" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their \"backward customs\" as central to Turkmen identity. Tribal Nationis the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

InThe Politics of Women's Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo explores how Iranian women understand their rights. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian leaders transformed the state into an Islamic republic. At that time, the country's leaders used a renewed discourse of women's rights to symbolize a shift away from the excesses of Western liberalism. Osanloo reveals that the postrevolutionary republic blended practices of a liberal republic with Islamic principles of equality. Her ethnographic study illustrates how women's claims of rights emerge from a hybrid discourse that draws on both liberal individualism and Islamic ideals. Osanloo takes the reader on a journey through numerous sites where rights are being produced--including Qur'anic reading groups, Tehran's family court, and law offices--as she sheds light on the fluid and constructed nature of women's perceptions of rights. In doing so, Osanloo unravels simplistic dichotomies between so-called liberal, universal rights and insular, local culture.The Politics of Women's Rights in Irancasts light on a contemporary non-Western understanding of the meaning behind liberal rights, and raises questions about the misunderstood relationship between modernity and Islam.

Karl Pearson, founder of modern statistics, came to this field by way of passionate early studies of philosophy and cultural history as well as ether physics and graphical geometry. His faith in science grew out of a deeply moral quest, reflected also in his socialism and his efforts to find a new basis for relations between men and women. This biography recounts Pearson's extraordinary intellectual adventure and sheds new light on the inner life of science. Theodore Porter's intensely personal portrait of Pearson extends from religious crisis and sexual tensions to metaphysical and even mathematical anxieties. Pearson sought to reconcile reason with enthusiasm and to achieve the impersonal perspective of science without sacrificing complex individuality. Even as he longed to experience nature directly and intimately, he identified science with renunciation and positivistic detachment. Porter finds a turning point in Pearson's career, where his humanistic interests gave way to statistical ones, in hisGrammar of Science(1892), in which he attempted to establish scientific method as the moral educational basis for a refashioned culture. In this original and engaging book, a leading historian of modern science investigates the interior experience of one man's scientific life while placing it in a rich tapestry of social, political, and intellectual movements.