The 'Other' Martyrs: Women and the Poetics of Sexuality, Sacrifice, and Death in World Literatures

The 'Other' Martyrs is a collection of essays that center on a diverse thematic array of women's martyrdom across periods and cultures. Ranging from Russia to Iraq, from Iran to Canada, from Greece to the lands of early, and spanning medieval and modern periods, each essay focuses on how women's sacrifice and martyrdom have been represented to diverse ends. In these, the main discovery is the 'how' of martyrdom and sacrifice, not just the 'what.' Each author unpacks the rhetoric, narrative strategies, and structure of their case to delve with rigor into the nature and function of women's sacrifice, and a wide range of theoretical and philological underpinnings informs the analyses. Readers will gain fresh insights into post-Soviet moments of cultural crises and gender construction through case studies of Pussy Riot and the film Everybody Dies But Me, War propaganda in early to mid-twentieth century Canada, women's oratory skills in early Islamicate culture, the imagery of women and children in Iranian official history, the construction of influential Greek martyrdom, to name some examples. While each essay easily stands alone because of its specific inquiry, the corpus offers a much-needed transnational, transperiod panorama of the many shapes and implications of women's sacrifice as seen in official and non-official discourse. The scholars are all leading authorities in their fields and therefore bring the most up-to-date and rigorous analyses to their inquiries.