Mahjong

Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. When this mass-produced game crossed the Pacific it created waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Mahjong narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women’s culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American pastime. This book also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game for a variety of economic and cultural purposes, including entrepreneurship, self-expression, philanthropy, and ethnic community building. One result was the forging of friendships within mahjong groups that lasted decades. This study unfolds in two parts. The first half is focused on mahjong’s history as related to consumerism, with a close examination of its economic and cultural origins. The second half explores how mahjong interwove with the experiences of racial inclusion and exclusion in the evolving definition of what it means to be American. Mahjong players, promoters, entrepreneurs, and critics tell a broad story of American modernity. The apparent contradictions of the game—as both American and foreign, modern and supposedly ancient, domestic and disruptive of domesticity—reveal the tensions that lie at the heart of modern American culture.

Madurese Women and Binding Culture in Muna Masyari’s Martabat Kematian: Gynocriticism Analysis

Muna Masyari is a famous female author from Pamekasan, Madura, whose one of her short stories, Sortana, won an award from Kompas, a national newspaper, as the best short story in 2017. Through her short stories, she consistent in depicting the social problems, particularly, related to Madurese women. This article discusses the portrayal of Madurese women in four short stories, namely Kembang Pengantin, Rumah Hantaran, Are’ Lancor, and Topeng Gelur. This article focuses on Madurese women as daughter and mother and their relation to nature and oppressed culture. This study uses descriptive approach with close reading method. Data collection is in the form of words and the data analysis is done by interpreting the data based on Elaine Showalter’s Gynocriticism which concerns with women as writer as well as the producer of literary texts. Gynocriticism mostly deals with four models; they are women’s writing and women’s body, women’s writing and women’s language, women’s writing and women’s psyche, and women’s writing and women’s culture. The results show Masyari reveals many problems attached to Madurese women through women’s body, language, psyche and culture. Madurese early arranged marriage and myths has placed Madurese women in oppressive and unfortunate conditions due to the binding culture that has dominated women. Muna Masyari, yet, places her female characters who are daring to speak their voice to have their own authority in searching their destiny in the future.

Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture

‘Will you write in my album?’ Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s ‘albo-mania’ come from, and why was it satirized as a women’s ‘mania’? What was the relation between visitors’ books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums’ re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a ‘feminized’ practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women’s culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture’s privileging of ‘original poetry’ have to say about attitudes towards creativity, poetic practice, and the print marketplace? Album Verses recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by the Lake poets’ daughters. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows that album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations between 1780 and 1850.

Our Rightful Place

Since women first entered the University of Kentucky (UK) in 1880 they have sought, demanded, and struggled for equality within the university. The period between 1880 and 1945 at UK witnessed women’s suffrage, two world wars, and an economic depression. It was during this time that women at UK worked to take their rightful place in the university’s life prior to the modern women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. The history of women at UK is not about women triumphant, and it remains an untidy story. After pushing for admission into a male-centric campus environment, women created women’s spaces, women’s organizations, and a women’s culture often patterned on those of men. At times, it seemed that a goal was to create a woman’s college within the larger university. However, coeducation meant that women, by necessity, competed with men academically while still navigating the evolving social norms of relationships between the sexes. Both of those paths created opportunities, challenges, and problems for women students and faculty. By taking a more women-centric view of the campus, this study shows more clearly the impact that women had over time on the culture and environment. It also allows a comparison, and perhaps a contrast, of the experiences of UK women with other public universities across the United States.