Author: Rebecca Messbarger File Type: pdf Eighteenth-century Italian playwright Pietro Chiari designated the age he lived in The Century of Women - an age when women gained considerable power through education and admission to various academic positions and professions. Structured as an extended disputation, this book tells the tale of five paradigmatic and ideologically divergent eighteenth-century Italian texts by male and female authors whose leitmotif is woman. These include an academic debate, a scientific tract, an oration, an Enlightenment journal, and a fashion magazine. Analysis focuses on the specific ways in which the exigencies of the new science and the burgeoning Enlightenment project founded on rational civil law, secular moral philosophy, and utilitarian social ethics forced a transformation in the formal controversy about women. By uncovering the characteristics of the expansive dominant discourse about women among Italian Enlightenment thinkers and of the counter-discourse women authors produced to assert their own distinct authority over constructions of femininity and the public sphere, this study reconceives eighteenth-century Italian culture and rectifies misconceptions about Italys position and influence within the literary republic of the European Enlightenment. Groundbreaking and original, this study is the first to examine the contribution of women to the Republic of Letters of the Settecento, and will revise prevailing notions of eighteenth-century Italian culture and academia. **

Author: Hamid Dabashi File Type: epub A history of the cosmopolitan forces that made contemporary Iran No ruling regime, writes Hamid Dabashi, could ever have a total claim over the idea of Iran as a nation, a people. For decades, the narrative about Iran has been dominated by a false binary, in which the traditional ruling Islamist regime is counterposed to a modern population of educated, secular urbanites. However, Iran has for many centuries been a nation forged from a diverse mix of influences, most of them non-sectarian and cosmopolitan. In Iran Without Borders, the acclaimed cultural critic and scholar of Iranian history Hamid Dabashi traces the evolution of this worldly culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, journeying through social and intellectual movements, and the lives of writers, artists and public intellectuals who articulated the idea of Iran on a transnational public sphere. Many left their homelandeither physically or emotionallyand imagined it from places as far-flung as Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Paris, or New York, but together they forged a nation as worldly as it is multifarious. **Review Reading Dabashi is like going for an extended coffee with a very smart friend. Vijay Prashad, author of *The Poorer Nations* In a grand sweep of Irans intellectual history since the eighteenth century, Dabashi discovers a cosmopolitan worldliness rooted in national freedom struggles. Written for a non-specialist readership, Iran Without Borders presents fascinating accounts of travelers, poets, artists, newspapers, the Babi movement, Mosaddegh and exiled Iranian students. Partha Chatterjee, author of *Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World* A highly valuable book that transcends identity politics, showing how the Iranian cultural landscapeand this includes ordinary liveshas been remarkably cosmopolitan. Rich in detail and powerful in argument, Iran Without Borders is a major contribution to the debate about the idea of the nation in Iran and beyond. Asef Bayat, author of *Life as Politics How Ordinary People Change the Middle East* A much-needed and healthy antidote to the existing literature on Iranian culture, which has stressed ideas of cultural authenticity and the presumed binary between modernity and tradition. Iran Without Borders offers a refreshingly different perspective that highlights cosmopolitanism, transnational fertilization, open-mindedness, and overcoming cultural barriers. Ervand Abrahamian, author of *The Coup 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.Iranian Relations* The grand clash of civilizations and ideologies will increasingly take place in the West, with such writers and intellectuals as Dabashi. *Guardian* A leading light in Iranian studies. *Chronicle of Higher Education* About the Author Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of, among other works, Iran A People Interrupted.