This collection is a scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana (c. 1500–1558) in the European imagination. Roxolana, or ‘Hurrem Sultan’, was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made a career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). These essays represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy. The contributors investigate her image in a variety of sources, ranging from early modern historical chronicles, dramas and travel writings, to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana, here translated into modern English. This collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives: source material is taken from England, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Ukraine.
The period in Volume V of the Series ‘The History of British Women's Writing’ witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. Building on the success and popularity of earlier poets, novelists, playwrights, and philosophers, British women consolidated their significance as writers in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. They participated in movements like Bluestocking intellectualism, abolition, new understandings of class, religion, and childhood. They initiated literary styles like the novel of sensibility, the elegiac sonnet, and the historical romance. A.o. Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Mary Tighe, and Joanna Baillie.