Roxolana in European Literature, History and Culture

Front Cover
Dr Galina I Yermolenko
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Apr 28, 2013 - Literary Criticism - 334 pages

This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana, or "Hurrem Sultan," was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards "the Other," and they investigate her image in a wide 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 for the first time.

Importantly, 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 volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism, cross-cultural exchange, and notions of identity, the Self, and the Other.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Critical Essays
21
Roxolana in Europe
23
East versus West Seraglio Queens Politics and Sexuality in Thomas Heywoods Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II
57
The Tragedy of Roxolana in the Court of Charles II
71
Roxolana in German Baroque and Enlightenment Dramas
89
How a Turkish Empress Became a Champion of Ukraine
109
Roxolanas Memoirs as a Garden of Intertextual Delight
125
Translations
163
Gonzalo de Illescas The Second Part of the Pontifical and Catholic History 1606
165
Lope de Vega The Holy League 1603
171
Prospero della Rovere Bonarelli Soliman 1620
195
Jean Desmares Roxelana 1643
217
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Giangir or the Rejected Throne 1748
237
Denys Sichynsky Roksoliana Historical Opera in Three Acts with a Prologue 1911
241
Copyright

Roxolana in Turkish Literature ReWriting the Ever Elusive Woman of Power and Desire
141

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About the author (2013)

Galina Yermolenko is Associate Professor of English at DeSales University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Marquette University, and a Ph.D. in Germanic Philology from Simferopol State University, Ukraine.

Galina Yermolenko, Clare Jowitt, Judy A. Hayden, Beate Allert, Oleksander Halenko, Maryna Romanets, Özlem Ögüt Yazicioglu, Ana Pinto, Virginia Pichietti, Andrzej Dziedzic.

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