Discourses of Difference unravels the complexities of writings by British women travellers of the `high colonial' period. Sara Mills examines the relation of women travellers to colonialism, positioned as they were at the site of conflicting discourses: femininity, feminism, and patriarchal imperialism. Using feminist discourse theory, Sara Mills analyses the writings of three women travellers - Alexandra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley and Nina Mazuchelli. Her examination of agency, identity, and the contemporary social environment, is an important and inspiring step forward in post-colonial cultural and literary theory.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Missionary Discourse examines missionary writings from India and southern Africa to explore colonial discourses about race, religion, gender and culture. The book is organised around three themes: family, sickness and violence, which were key areas of missionary concern, and important axes around which colonial difference was forged.

Sara Mills offers an accessible and comprehensive analysis of the term 'discourse' and explores the theoretical assumptions underlying it. This handy, easy to follow pocket guidebook for students provides: straightforward working definitions historical developments of the term studied analysis of Michel Foucault discussion of the appropriation of the term 'discourse' by feminist, colonial and post-colonial discourse theorists examples of literary and non-literary texts to illustrate the use of 'discourse'.

Juxtaposing the insights of feminism with those of marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, this unique collection creates new common ground for women's studies and Renaissance studies. An outstanding array of scholars—literary critics, art critics, and historians—reexamines the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance. In the process, the contributors enrich the emerging languages of and about women, gender, and sexual difference. Throughout, the essays focus on the structures of Renaissance patriarchy that organized power relations both in the state and in the family. They explore the major conequences of patriarchy for women—their marginalization and lack of identity and power—and the ways in which individual women or groups of women broke, or in some cases deliberately circumvented, the rules that defined them as a secondary sex. Topics covered include representations of women in literature and art, the actual work done by women both inside and outside of the home, and the writings of women themselves. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies that "marginalized" historical and fictional women, these essays counter scholarly and critical traditions that continue to exhibit patriarchal biases.

This book explores how narratives are deeply embodied, engaging heart, soul, as well as mind, through varying adult learner perspectives. Biographical research is not an isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and networks – that can create or destroy hope. Telling or listening to life stories celebrates complexity, messiness, and the rich potential of learning lives. The narratives in this book highlight the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. Yet, despite living in a precarious, and often frightening, liquid world, biographical research can both chronicle and illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations. Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research aims to generate insight into people’s fears and anxieties but also their capacity to 'keep on keeping on' and to challenge forces that would diminish their and all our humanity. It provides a sustainable approach to creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by showing how building meaningful dialogue, grounded in social justice, can create good enough experiences of togetherness across difference. The book illuminates what amounts to an ecology of life, learning and human flourishing in a sometimes tortured, fractious, fragmented, and fragile world, yet one still offering rich resources of hope.

Machiavelli saw history in general as a way to learn useful lessons from the past for the present, and also as a type of analysis which could be built upon, as long as each generation did not forget the works of the past. In "Discourses on Livy" Machiavelli discusses what can be learned from roman period and many other eras as well, including the politics of his lifetime. This is a work of political history and philosophy written in the early 16th. The title identifies the work's subject as the first ten books of Livy's Ab urbe condita, which relate the expansion of Rome through the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BC. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer. He has often been called the father of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He served as a secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power.He wrote his most well-known work The Prince in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.