Patriarchal Moments

Reading Patriarchal Texts

Cesare Cuttica, Gaby Mahlberg, Cesare Cuttica, Gaby Mahlberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781472589156
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472589170
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Patriarchalism is omnipresent in Western culture and it pervades the texts that have shaped this culture. From the creation story in the Bible to the ancient authors, from the Church fathers to the treatises of Enlightenment philosophers, right up to modern fiction, male authority over women, children and other dependents has shaped the nature of human relationships and the discourses about these relationships.

This collection of short essays offers fresh and novel readings of key texts in the history of patriarchalism as a concept of power. The texts selected are from political, religious and literary works and together the readings add new insights to a tradition that has never gone uncontested, yet is unlikely to disappear soon.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Of Women, Snakes and Trees: The Bible
• 2. The Talmud: A Tale of Two Bodies
• 3. Patriarchalism and the Qur’an
• 4. Citizens But Second Class: Women in Aristotle’s Politics (384–322 B.C.E.)
• 5. Augustine’s The City of God (fifth century A.D.): Patriarchy, Pluralism and the Creation of Man
• 6. Men, Women and Monsters: John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558)
• 7. Love and Order: William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622)
• 8. Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680): Absolute Power, Political Patriarchalism and Patriotic Language
• 9. Patriarchy, Primogeniture and Prescription: Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698)
• 10. Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693): Fathers and Conversational Friendship
• 11. ‘Nothing Pleases Like an Intire Subjection’: Mary Astell Reflects on the Politics of Marriage (1700)
• 12. Ants, Bees, Fathers, Sons: Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) and the Natural History of Patriarchy
• 13. Rousseau’s Emile (1762): The Patriarchal Family and the Education of the Republican Citizen
• 14. Patriarchy and Enlightenment in Immanuel Kant (1784)
• 15. In ‘Her Father’s House’: Women as Property in Wollstonecraft’s Mary (1788)
• 16. Father Enfantin, the Saint-Simonians and the ‘Call to Woman’ (1831)
• 17. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
• 18. Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) as ‘Patriarchal Moment’
• 19. Account of a Fight against Paternal Authority: Franz Kafka’s Letter to his Father (1919)
• 20. Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1932): Patriarchy’s Tragic Flaws
• 21. ‘His Peremptory Prick’: The Failure of the Phallic in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)
• Conclusion
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes
• Index
• Imprint