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97 scholarly books by Bucknell University Press
The Quotable Voltaire
Garry Apgar
Bucknell University Press, 2021
The author of more than 2,000 books and pamphlets, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) was one of the most prolific writers of the eighteenth century, and also one of the wittiest and most insightful. This unique collection of over 800 of Voltaire’s wisest passages and choicest bons mots runs the gamut on topics from adultery to Zoroaster, in both English and French.
Drawing from a wide range of his publications, private letters, and remarks recorded by his contemporaries, The Quotable Voltaire includes material never before gathered in a single volume. English translations appear alongside the original French, and each quote is thoroughly indexed and referenced, with page numbers for both the first known publication edition of each entry and the most recent edition of Voltaire’s works. The book also features over 400 quotes about Voltaire, including commentary by eighteenth-century luminaries like Samuel Johnson, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and John Adams, as well as an eclectic assortment of modern-day personages ranging from Winston Churchill and Jorge Luis Borges to Mae West and Mike Tyson.
Lavishly illustrated with nearly three dozen images of Voltaire-related art, this collection opens with a scholarly essay that recounts the great man’s life and reflects on his outsized influence on Western culture. Whether you are a Voltaire scholar or a neophyte, The Quotable Voltaire is the perfect introduction to a brilliant mind.
Drawing from a wide range of his publications, private letters, and remarks recorded by his contemporaries, The Quotable Voltaire includes material never before gathered in a single volume. English translations appear alongside the original French, and each quote is thoroughly indexed and referenced, with page numbers for both the first known publication edition of each entry and the most recent edition of Voltaire’s works. The book also features over 400 quotes about Voltaire, including commentary by eighteenth-century luminaries like Samuel Johnson, Catherine the Great, Casanova, and John Adams, as well as an eclectic assortment of modern-day personages ranging from Winston Churchill and Jorge Luis Borges to Mae West and Mike Tyson.
Lavishly illustrated with nearly three dozen images of Voltaire-related art, this collection opens with a scholarly essay that recounts the great man’s life and reflects on his outsized influence on Western culture. Whether you are a Voltaire scholar or a neophyte, The Quotable Voltaire is the perfect introduction to a brilliant mind.
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The Dark Eclipse
Reflections on Suicide and Absence
A.W. Barnes
Bucknell University Press, 2019
The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. In addition, the narrative traces the brothers’ difficult relationship with their father, a man who once studied to be a Trappist monk before marrying and fathering eight children. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Global Wordsworth
Romanticism Out of Place
Katherine Bergren
Bucknell University Press, 2019
The Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth’s poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth’s afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own—and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception—critical, appreciative, and ambivalent—inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Calila
The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite
Joan L. Brown
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Calila: The Later Novels of Carmen Martín Gaite explores the last six novels by Spain´s most honored contemporary woman writer. Its scholarship is enriched by the voice of Calila herself—as Brown called Martín Gaite, who was a dear friend—as they conversed and exchanged letters during the composition of the novels. The book opens with an introduction to Martín Gaite´s life and literature and ends with a consideration of her legacy. Each central chapter analyzes a later novel in its historical, biographical, and critical contexts. From the young adult fantasy Caperucita en Manhattan (Red Riding Hood in Manhattan) to the post-Transition epistolary masterpiece Nubosidad variable (Variable Cloud), the Transition-era saga La Reina de las Nieves (The Farewell Angel), the Proustian reminiscence Lo raro es vivir (Living’s the Strange Thing), the narrative tapestry Irse de casa (Leaving Home), and the memoir of family secrets Los parentescos (Family Relations), these fascinating novels evoke themes that resonate today.
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Intelligent Souls?
Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature
Samara Anne Cahill
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Intelligent Souls? offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of “feminist orientalism.” One strand describes seventeenth-century ideas about the nature of the soul used to denigrate religio-political opponents. A second tracks the transference of these ideas to Islam during the Glorious Revolution and the Trinitarian controversy of the 1690s. The confluence of these discourses compounded if not wholly produced the stereotype that Islam denied women intelligent souls. Surprisingly, women writers of the period accepted the stereotype, but used it for their own purposes. Rowe, Carter, Lennox, More, and Wollstonecraft, Cahill argues, established common ground with men by leveraging the “otherness” identified with Islam to dispute British culture’s assumption that British women were lacking in intelligence, selfhood, or professional abilities. When Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she accepted that view as true—and “feminist orientalism” was born, introducing a fallacy about Islam to the West that persists to this day.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century
Tanya M. Caldwell
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. Employing the methodology William Godwin outlined for novelists of taking material “from all sources, experience, report, and the records of human affairs,” each contributor examines within the contexts of their time and historical traditions the anxieties and imperatives of the auto/biographer as she or he shapes material into a legacy. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Families of the Heart
Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
Ann Campbell
Bucknell University Press, 2023
In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.
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Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities
Jeremy Chow
Bucknell University Press, 2023
This groundbreaking new volume unites eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, showcasing how these fields can vibrantly benefit one another. In eleven chapters that engage a variety of eighteenth-century texts, contributors explore timely themes and topics such as climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, indigeneity and decoloniality, and green utopianism. Additionally, each chapter reflects on pedagogical concerns, asking: How do we teach eighteenth-century environmental humanities? With particular attention to the voices of early-career scholars who bring cutting-edge perspectives, these essays highlight vital and innovative trends that can enrich both disciplines, making them essential for classroom use.
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Beside the Bard
Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns
George S. Christian
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Beside the Bard argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations. This fluid conception of the nation may accommodate a post-Union British self-identification, but it also recognizes the instrumental and historically contingent nature of “Britishness.” Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, literati or autodidacts, poets such as Alexander Wilson, Carolina Olyphant, Robert Tannahill, and John Lapraik, among others, adamantly refuse to imagine a single nation, British or otherwise, instead preferring an open, polyvocal field, on which they can stage new national and personal formations and fight new revolutions. In this sense, “Scotland” is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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1650-1850
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 24)
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2019
With issue twenty-four of 1650–1850, this annual enters its second quarter-century with a new publisher, a new look, a new editorial board, and a new commitment to intellectual and artistic exploration. As the diversely inventive essays in this first issue from the Bucknell University Press demonstrate, the energy and open-mindedness that made 1650–1850 a success continue to intensify. This first Bucknell issue includes a special feature that explores the use of sacred space in what was once incautiously called “the age of reason.” A suite of book reviews renews the 1650–1850 legacy of full-length and unbridled evaluation of the best in contemporary Enlightenment scholarship. These lively and informative reviews celebrate the many years that book review editor Baerbel Czennia has served 1650–1850 and also make for an able handoff to Samara Anne Cahill of Nanyang Technological University, who will edit the book review section beginning with our next volume. Most important of all, this issue serves as an invitation to scholars to offer their most creative and thoughtful work for consideration for publication in 1650–1850.
About the annual journal 1650-1850
1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines—literature (both in English and other languages), philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the “hard” and the “humane” disciplines. The editors encourage proposals for “special features” that bring together five to seven essays on focused themes within its historical range, from the Interregnum to the end of the first generation of Romantic writers. While also being open to more specialized or particular studies that match up with the general themes and goals of the journal, 1650-1850 is in the first instance a journal about the artful presentation of ideas that welcomes good writing from its contributors.
About the annual journal 1650-1850
1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines—literature (both in English and other languages), philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the “hard” and the “humane” disciplines. The editors encourage proposals for “special features” that bring together five to seven essays on focused themes within its historical range, from the Interregnum to the end of the first generation of Romantic writers. While also being open to more specialized or particular studies that match up with the general themes and goals of the journal, 1650-1850 is in the first instance a journal about the artful presentation of ideas that welcomes good writing from its contributors.
First published in 1994, 1650-1850 is currently in its 24th volume.
ISSN 1065-3112.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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1650-1850
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 28)
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 28 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will experience two blockbuster multi-author special features that explore both the deep traditions and the new frontiers of early modern studies: one that views adaptation and digitization through the lens of “Sterneana,” the vast literary and cultural legacy following on the writings of Laurence Sterne, a legacy that sweeps from Hungarian renditions of the puckish novelist through the Bloomsbury circle and on into cybernetics, and one that pays tribute to legendary scholar Irwin Primer by probing the always popular but also always challenging writings of that enigmatic poet-philosopher, Bernard Mandeville. All that, plus the usual cavalcade of full-length book reviews.
ISSN: 1065-3112
Published by Bucknell University Press, distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
ISSN: 1065-3112
Published by Bucknell University Press, distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Hemispheres and Stratospheres
The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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1650-1850
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 27)
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, and analysis of the full range of long-eighteenth-century writing, thinking, and artistry. Combining fresh considerations of prominent authors and artists with searches for overlooked or offbeat elements of the Enlightenment legacy, 1650–1850 delivers a comprehensive but richly detailed rendering of the first days, the first principles, and the first efforts of modern culture. Its pages open to the works of all nations and language traditions, providing a truly global picture of a period that routinely shattered boundaries. Volume 27 of this long-running journal is no exception to this tradition of focused inclusivity. Readers will travel through a blockbuster special feature on the topic of worldmaking and other worlds—on the Enlightenment zest for the discovery, charting, imagining, and evaluating of new worlds, envisioned worlds, utopian worlds, and worlds of the future. Essays in this enthusiastically extraterritorial offering escort readers through the science-fictional worlds of Lady Cavendish, around European gardens, over the high seas, across the American frontiers, into forests and exotic ecosystems, and, in sum, into the unlimited expanses of the Enlightenment mind. Further enlivening the volume is a cavalcade of full-length book reviews evaluating the latest in eighteenth-century scholarship.
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1650-1850
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 25)
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Volume 25 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era investigates the local textures that make up the whole cloth of the Enlightenment. Ranging from China to Cheltenham and from Spinoza to civil insurrection, volume 25 celebrates the emergence of long-eighteenth-century culture from particularities and prodigies. Unfurling in the folds of this volume is a special feature on playwright, critic, and literary theorist John Dennis. Edited by Claude Willan, the feature returns a major player in eighteenth-century literary culture to his proper role at the center of eighteenth-century politics, art, publishing, and dramaturgy. This celebration of John Dennis mingles with a full company of essays in the character of revealing case studies. Essays on a veritable world of topics—on Enlightenment philosophy in China; on riots as epitomes of Anglo-French relations; on domestic animals as observers; on gothic landscapes; and on prominent literati such as Jonathan Swift, Arthur Murphy, and Samuel Johnson—unveil eye-opening perspectives on a “long” century that prized diversity and that looked for transformative events anywhere, everywhere, all the time. Topping it all off is a full portfolio of reviews evaluating the best books on the literature, philosophy, and the arts of this abundant era.
About the annual journal 1650-1850
1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines—literature (both in English and other languages), philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the “hard” and the “humane” disciplines. The editors encourage proposals for “special features” that bring together five to seven essays on focused themes within its historical range, from the Interregnum to the end of the first generation of Romantic writers. While also being open to more specialized or particular studies that match up with the general themes and goals of the journal, 1650-1850 is in the first instance a journal about the artful presentation of ideas that welcomes good writing from its contributors.
First published in 1994, 1650-1850 is currently in its 25th volume.
ISSN 1065-3112.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[more]
1650-1850
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 26)
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Volume 26 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era travels beyond the usual discussions of power, identity, and cultural production to visit the purlieus and provinces of Britain’s literary empire. Bulging at its bindings are essays investigating out-of-the-way but influential ensembles, whether female religious enthusiasts, annotators of Maria Edgeworth’s underappreciated works, or modern video-based Islamic super-heroines energized by Mary Wollstonecraft’s irreverance. The global impact of the local is celebrated in studies of the personal pronoun in Samuel Johnson’s political writings and of the outsize role of a difficult old codger in catalyzing the literary career of Charlotte Smith. Headlining a volume that peers into minute details in order to see the outer limits of Enlightenment culture is a special feature on metaphor in long-eighteenth-century poetry and criticism. Five interdisciplinary essays investigate the deep Enlightenment origins of a trope usually associated with the rise of Romanticism. Volume 26 culminates in a rich review section containing fourteen responses to current books on Enlightenment religion, science, literature, philosophy, political science, music, history, and art.
About the annual journal 1650-1850
1650-1850 publishes essays and reviews from and about a wide range of academic disciplines: literature (both in English and other languages), philosophy, art history, history, religion, and science. Interdisciplinary in scope and approach, 1650-1850 emphasizes aesthetic manifestations and applications of ideas, and encourages studies that move between the arts and the sciences—between the “hard” and the “humane” disciplines. The editors encourage proposals for special features that bring together five to seven essays on focused themes within its historical range, from the Interregnum to the end of the first generation of Romantic writers. While also being open to more specialized or particular studies that match up with the general themes and goals of the journal, 1650-1850 is in the first instance a journal about the artful presentation of ideas that welcomes good writing from its contributors.
ISSN 1065-3112.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Paper, Ink, and Achievement
Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2021
During his forty-two years as president of AMS Press, Gabriel Hornstein quietly sponsored and stimulated the revival of “long” eighteenth-century studies. Whether by reanimating long-running research publications; by creating scholarly journals; or by converting daring ideas into lauded books, “Gabe” initiated a golden age of Enlightenment scholarship. This understated publishing magnate created a global audience for a research specialty that many scholars dismissed as antiquarianism. Paper, Ink, and Achievement finds in the career of this impresario a vantage point on the modern study of the Enlightenment. An introduction discusses Hornstein’s life and achievements, revealing the breadth of his influence on our understanding of the early days of modernity. Three sets of essays open perspectives on the business of long-eighteenth-century studies: on the role of publishers, printers, and bibliophiles in manufacturing cultural legacies; on authors whose standing has been made or eclipsed by the book culture; and on literary modes that have defined, delimited, or directed Enlightenment studies.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Imprisoned Traveler
Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon's Italy
Keith Crook
Bucknell University Press, 2020
The Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Mormons in Paris
Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892
Corry Cropper
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Winner of the 2021 Best International Book Award from the Mormon History Association
In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Velocipedomania
A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France
Corry Cropper
Bucknell University Press, 2023
When blacksmith Pierre Michaux affixed pedals to the front axle of a two-wheeled scooter with a seat, he helped kick off a craze known as velocipedomania, which swept France in the late 1860s. The immediate forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede similarly reflected changing cultural attitudes and challenged gender norms.
Velocipedomania is the first in-depth study of the velocipede fad and the popular culture it inspired. It explores how the device was hailed as a symbol of France’s cutting-edge technological advancements, yet also marketed as an invention with a noble pedigree, born from the nation’s cultural and literary heritage. Giving readers a window into the material culture and enthusiasms of Second Empire France, it provides the first English translations of 1869’s Manual of the Velocipede, 1868’s Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, and the 1869 operetta Dagobert and his Velocipede. It also reprints scores of rare images from newspapers and advertisements, analyzing how these magnificent machines captured the era’s visual imagination. By looking at how it influenced French attitudes towards politics, national identity, technology, fashion, fitness, and gender roles, this book shows how the short-lived craze of velocipedomania had a big impact.
Velocipedomania is the first in-depth study of the velocipede fad and the popular culture it inspired. It explores how the device was hailed as a symbol of France’s cutting-edge technological advancements, yet also marketed as an invention with a noble pedigree, born from the nation’s cultural and literary heritage. Giving readers a window into the material culture and enthusiasms of Second Empire France, it provides the first English translations of 1869’s Manual of the Velocipede, 1868’s Note on Monsieur Michaux’s Velocipede, and the 1869 operetta Dagobert and his Velocipede. It also reprints scores of rare images from newspapers and advertisements, analyzing how these magnificent machines captured the era’s visual imagination. By looking at how it influenced French attitudes towards politics, national identity, technology, fashion, fitness, and gender roles, this book shows how the short-lived craze of velocipedomania had a big impact.
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Oriental Networks
Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bärbel Czennia
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period of improving transportation technology, expansion of intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In eight case studies and a substantial introduction, the volume examines relationships between individuals and institutions, precursors to modern networks that engaged in forms of intercultural exchange. Addressing the exchange of cultural commodities (plants, animals, and artifacts), cultural practices and ideas, the roles of ambassadors and interlopers, and the literary and artistic representation of networks, networkers, and networking, contributors discuss the effects on people previously separated by vast geographical and cultural distance. Rather than idealizing networks as inherently superior to other forms of organization, Oriental Networks also considers Enlightenment expressions of resistance to networking that inform modern skepticism toward the concept of the global network and its politics. In doing so the volume contributes to the increasingly global understanding of culture and communication.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Printed Reader
Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Amelia Dale
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Beyond Human
Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes
Tara Daly
Bucknell University Press, 2019
In the Andes, indigenous knowledge systems based on the relationships between different beings, both earthly and heavenly, animal and plant, have been central to the organization of knowledge since precolonial times. The legacies of colonialism and the continuance of indigenous cultures make the Andes a unique place from which to think about art and social change as ongoing, and as encompassing more than an exclusively human perspective. Beyond Human revises established readings of the avant-gardes in Peru and Bolivia as humanizing and historical. By presenting fresh readings of canonical authors like César Vallejo, José María Arguedas, and Magda Portal, and through analysis of newer artist-activists like Julieta Paredes, Mujeres Creando Comunidad, and Alejandra Dorado, Daly argues instead that avant-gardes complicate questions of agency and contribute to theoretical discussions on vital materialisms: the idea that life happens between animate and inanimate beings—human and non-human—and is made sensible through art.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
The Stoke Newington Edition
Daniel Defoe
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Robinson Crusoe, an adventure tale that fascinated such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee, has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. Moreover, the notion of isolation on a deserted island and a fascination with survival continue to be central to countless popular cinema and television programs. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation of the novel. There has been no other edition like it.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World
The Stoke Newington Edition
Daniel Defoe
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with his Vision of the Angelick World, first published in 1720 and considered a sequel to The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, is a collection of essays written in the voice of the Crusoe character. Expressing Defoe’s thoughts about many moral questions of the day, the narrator takes up isolation, poverty, religious liberty, and epistemology. Defoe also used this volume to revive his interest in poetry, not the satiric poetry of the early eighteenth century, but the more inspirational verse that appeared in some of his later works. Serious Reflections also includes an imaginative flight in which Crusoe wanders among the planets, a return to the moon voyage impulse of Defoe’s 1705 work The Consolidator. Illuminating the ideas and philosophy of this most influential of English novelists, it is invaluable for any student of the period.
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Romantic Automata
Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms
Michael Demson
Bucknell University Press, 2020
For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Romantic Automata is a collection of essays examining the rise of this cultural suspicion of mechanical imitations of life.
Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Dante in Deutschland
An Itinerary of Romantic Myth
Daniel DiMassa
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.
[more]
Mayaya Rising
Black Female Icons in Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture
Dawn Duke
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Who are the Black heroines of Latin America and the Caribbean? Where do we turn for models of transcendence among women of African ancestry in the region? In answer to the historical dearth of such exemplars, Mayaya Rising explores and celebrates the work of writers who intentionally center powerful female cultural archetypes. In this inventive analysis, Duke proposes three case studies and a corresponding womanist methodology through which to study and rediscover these figures. The musical Cuban-Dominican sisters and former slaves Teodora and Micaela Ginés inspired Aida Cartagena Portalatin’s epic poem Yania tierra; the Nicaraguan matriarch of the May Pole, “Miss Lizzie,” figures prominently in four anthologies from the country’s Bluefields region; and the iconic palenqueras of Cartagena, Columbia are magnified in the work of poets María Teresa Ramírez Neiva and Mirian Díaz Pérez. In elevating these figures and foregrounding these works, Duke restores and repairs the scholarly record.
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The Limits of Familiarity
Authorship and Romantic Readers
Lindsey Eckert
Bucknell University Press, 2022
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
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Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
Frieda Ekotto
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France
Fayçal Falaky
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.
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Novel Bodies
Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Jason S. Farr
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory
Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels
Earl E. Fitz
Bucknell University Press, 2019
This book makes the argument that Machado de Assis, hailed as one of Latin American literature’s greatest writers, was also a major theoretician of the modern novel form. Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning. It is from this discovery about the nature of language as a self-referential semiotic system that Machado crafts his “new narrative.” Long celebrated in Brazil as a dazzlingly original writer, Machado has struggled to gain respect and attention outside the Luso-Brazilian ken. He is the epitome of the “outsider” or “marginal,” the iconoclastic and wildly innovative genius who hails from a culture rarely studied in the Western literary hierarchy and so consigned to the status of “eccentric.” Had the Brazilian master written not in Portuguese but English, French, or German, he would today be regarded as one of the true exemplars of the modern novel, in expression as well as in theory.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Novel Stage
Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen
Marcie Frank
Bucknell University Press, 2020
2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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White Light
The Poetry of Alberto Blanco
Ronald J. Friis
Bucknell University Press, 2022
White Light: The Poetry of Alberto Blanco examines the interplay of complementary images and concepts in the award-winning Mexican writer's cycle of poems from 1979 to 2018. Blanco’s poetic trilogy A la luz de siempre is characterized by its broad range of form and subject and by the poet's own eclectic background as a chemist, maker of collages, and musician. Blanco speaks the language of the visual arts, science, mathematics, music, and philosophy, and creates work with deep interdisciplinary roots. This book explores how polarities such as space and place, reading and writing, sound and silence, visual and verbal representation, and faith and doubt are woven through A la luz de siempre. These complements reveal how Blanco’s poetry, like the phenomenon of white light, embraces paradox and transforms into something more than the sum of its disparate and polychromatic parts.
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Avenues of Translation
The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing
Regina Galasso
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited Collection
Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of translation.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of translation.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building
National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897-1940
Naida García-Crespo
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building focuses on the processes of Puerto Rican national identity formation as seen through the historical development of cinema on the island between 1897 and 1940. Anchoring her work in archival sources in film technology, economy, and education, Naida García-Crespo argues that Puerto Rico’s position as a stateless nation allows for a fresh understanding of national cinema based on perceptions of productive cultural contributions rather than on citizenship or state structures. This book aims to contribute to recently expanding discussions of cultural networks by analyzing how Puerto Rican cinema navigates the problems arising from the connection and/or disjunction between nation and state. The author argues that Puerto Rico’s position as a stateless nation puts pressure on traditional conceptions of national cinema, which tend to rely on assumptions of state support or a bounded nation-state. She also contends that the cultural and business practices associated with early cinema reveal that transnationalism is an integral part of national identities and their development. García-Crespo shows throughout this book that the development and circulation of cinema in Puerto Rico illustrate how the “national” is built from transnational connections.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama
Reception and Afterlives
Amy Garnai
Bucknell University Press, 2023
A key figure in British literary circles following the French Revolution, novelist and playwright Thomas Holcroft promoted ideas of reform and equality informed by the philosophy of his close friend William Godwin. Arrested for treason in 1794 and released without trial, Holcroft was notorious in his own time, but today appears mainly as a supporting character in studies of 1790s literary activism. Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama authoritatively reintroduces and reestablishes this central figure of the revolutionary decade by examining his life, plays, memoirs, and personal correspondence. In engaging with theatrical censorship, apostacy, and the response of audiences and critics to radical drama, this thoughtful study also demonstrates how theater functions in times of political repression. Despite his struggles, Holcroft also had major successes: this book examines his surprisingly robust afterlife, as his plays, especially The Road to Ruin, were repeatedly revived worldwide in the nineteenth century.
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Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey
A Legacy to the World
W. B. Gerard
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. Deemed more accessible than Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and often assigned as a college text, A Sentimental Journey has received its share of critical attention, but—unlike Tristram Shandy—to date it has not been the subject of a dedicated anthology of critical essays. This volume fills that gap with fresh perspectives on Sterne’s novel that will appeal to students and critics alike. Together with an introduction that situates each essay within A Sentimental Journey’s reception history, and a tailpiece detailing the culmination of Sterne’s career and his death, this volume presents a cohesive approach to this significant text that is simultaneously grounded and revelatory.
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British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830
Kristin M. Girten
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
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Jane Austen and Comedy
Erin Goss
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen’s work.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Mikhail Bakhtin
The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
Slav N Gratchev
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views: on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Lothario's Corpse
Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700-1832
Daniel Gustafson
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama’s gradual disappearance from the nation’s acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject’s relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario’s Corpse suggests the “long-running” nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Planet Work
Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene
Ryan Hediger
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.
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Two Women
A Novel
Barbara F. Ichiishi
Bucknell University Press, 2022
In 1842, a young Cuban woman living in Spain published a novel that was so passionate and boldly feminist in content, it did not appear in her homeland until more than seventy years later. Two Women tells the riveting tale of a tumultuous love triangle among three wealthy Spaniards: a brilliant, young, widowed countess named Catalina, her inexperienced lover Carlos, and his pure and virtuous wife Luisa. The two women start out as rivals, yet in an insightful twist, they ultimately find they are both victims of a patriarchal society that ruthlessly pits women against each other. As the story builds to its thrilling climax, they confront the stark truth that in nineteenth-century Spain, women have few paths to a happy ending.
This first English translation of the novel captures the lyrical romanticism of its prose and includes a scholarly introduction to the work and its author, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a pioneering feminist and anti-slavery activist who based the character of Catalina on her own experience. Two Women is a searing indictment of the stern laws and customs governing marriage in the Hispanic world, brought to life in a spellbinding, tragic love story.
This first English translation of the novel captures the lyrical romanticism of its prose and includes a scholarly introduction to the work and its author, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a pioneering feminist and anti-slavery activist who based the character of Catalina on her own experience. Two Women is a searing indictment of the stern laws and customs governing marriage in the Hispanic world, brought to life in a spellbinding, tragic love story.
[more]
Dystopias of Infamy
Insult and Collective Identity in Early Modern Spain
Javier Irigoyen-García
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Insults, scorn, and verbal abuse—frequently deployed to affirm the social identity of the insulter—are destined to fail when that language is appropriated and embraced by the maligned group. In such circumstances, slander may instead empower and reinforce the collective identity of those perceived to be a threat to an idealized society. In this innovative study, Irigoyen-Garcia examines how the discourse and practices of insult and infamy shaped the cultural imagination, anxieties, and fantasies of early modern Spain. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary works, archival research, religious and political literature, and iconographic documents, Dystopias of Infamy traces how the production of insults haunts the imaginary of power, provoking latent anxieties about individual and collective resistance to subjectification. Of particular note is Cervantes’s tendency to parody regulatory fantasies about infamy throughout his work, lampooning repressive law for its paradoxical potential to instigate the very defiance it fears.
[more]
To the Fairest Cape
European Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope
Malcolm Jack
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Crossing the remote, southern tip of Africa has fired the imagination of European travellers from the time Bartholomew Dias opened up the passage to the East by rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes formed an endless stream of seafarers who made the long journey southwards in pursuit of wealth, adventure, science, and missionary, as well as outright national, interest. Beginning by considering the early hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Cape and their culture, Malcolm Jack focuses in his account on the encounter that the European visitors had with the Khoisan peoples, sometimes sympathetic but often exploitative from the time of the Portuguese to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. This commercial and colonial background is key to understanding the development of the vibrant city that is modern Cape Town, as well as the rich diversity of the Cape hinterland.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts
Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico
Cara Anne Kinnally
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843
Misty Krueger
Bucknell University Press, 2021
This important new collection explores representations of late seventeenth- through mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travelers across a range of historical and literary works. While at one time transatlantic studies concentrated predominantly on men’s travels, this volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic—some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement. The essays gathered here concern themselves with the fictional and the historical, national and geographic location, racial and ethnic identities, and the configuration of the transatlantic world in increasingly taught texts such as The Female American and The Woman of Colour, as well as less familiar material such as Merian’s writing on the insects of Surinam and Falconbridge’s travels to Sierra Leone. Intersectional in its approach, and with an afterword by Eve Tavor Bannet, this essential collection will prove indispensable as it provides fresh new perspectives on transatlantic texts and women’s travel therein across the long eighteenth century.
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Play in the Age of Goethe
Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800
Edgar Landgraf
Bucknell University Press, 2020
We are inundated with game play today. Digital devices offer opportunities to play almost anywhere and anytime. No matter our age, gender, social, cultural, or educational background—we play. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 is the first book-length work to explore how the modern discourse of play was first shaped during this pivotal period (approximately 1770-1830). The eleven chapters illuminate critical developments in the philosophy, pedagogy, psychology, politics, and poetics of play as evident in the work of major authors of the period including Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Pestalozzi, Jacobi, Tieck, Jean Paul, Schleiermacher, and Fröbel. While drawing on more recent theories of play by thinkers such as Jean Piaget, Donald Winnicott, Jost Trier, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Henricks, and Patrick Jagoda, the volume shows the debates around play in German letters of this period to be far richer and more complex than previously thought, as well as more relevant for our current engagement with play. Indeed, modern debates about what constitutes good rather than bad practices of play can be traced to these foundational discourses.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Community and Solitude
New Essays on Johnson’s Circle
Anthony W. Lee
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Samuel Johnson’s life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships—and antagonisms. Community and Solitude is a collection of ten essays that explore relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries—including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Frances Burney, Robert Chambers, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Arthur Murphy, Richard Savage, Anna Seward, and Thomas Warton—and analyzes some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships. In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility.
Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Contributors: Christopher Catanese, James Caudle, Marilyn Francus, Christine Jackson-Holzberg, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Elizabeth Lambert, Anthony W. Lee, James E. May, John Radner, and Lance Wilcox.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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A Clubbable Man
Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham
Anthony W. Lee
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Samuel Johnson famously referred to his future biographer, the unsociable magistrate Sir John Hawkins, as “a most unclubbable man." Conversely, this celebratory volume gathers distinguished eighteenth-century studies scholars to honor the achievements, professional generosity, and sociability of Greg Clingham, taking as its theme textual and social group formations. Here, Philip Smallwood examines the “mirrored minds” of Johnson and Shakespeare, while David Hopkins parses intersections of the general and particular in three key eighteenth-century figures. Aaron Hanlon draws parallels between instances of physical rambling and rhetorical strategies in Johnson’s Rambler, while Cedric D. Reverand dissects the intertextual strands uniting Dryden and Pope. Contributors take up other topics significant to the field, including post-feminism, travel, and seismology. Whether discussing cultural exchange or textual reciprocities, each piece extends the theme, building on the trope of relationship to organize and express its findings. Rounding out this collection are tributes from Clingham’s former students and colleagues, including original poetry.
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Indiscreet Fantasies
Iberian Queer Cinema
Andrés Lema-Hincapié
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Pedro Almodóvar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are multitudes of LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation. Indiscreet Fantasies is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films produced in the region over the past fifty years, each by a different director, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1969) to João Pedro Rodrigues’s O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Contributors examine how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical trauma—from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime—and explore how these films demonstrate a fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. The result will give readers a new appreciation for the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its thought-provoking queer cinema.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Transpoetic Exchange
Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues
Marília Librandi
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.
The volume is divided into three parts. “Essays” unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, “Remembrances,” collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz’s poem and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. In the last section, “Poems,” five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, André Vallias, and Charles Bernstein.
Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.
This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The volume is divided into three parts. “Essays” unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, “Remembrances,” collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz’s poem and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. In the last section, “Poems,” five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, André Vallias, and Charles Bernstein.
Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.
This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Rewriting Crusoe
The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media
Jakub Lipski
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Space, Drama, and Empire
Mapping the Past in Lope de Vega's Comedia
Javier Lorenzo
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Spanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain’s classical theater. In this rich and informative study, Javier Lorenzo investigates the symbolic use of space in Lope’s drama, and its function as an ideological tool to promote an imagined Spanish national past. In specific plays, this book argues, historical landscapes and settings were used to foretell and legitimize the imperial present in Hapsburg Spain, allowing audiences to visualize and plot, as on a map, the country’s expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries. By focusing on connections among space, drama, and empire, this book makes an important contribution to the study of literature and imperialism in early modern Spain, and equally to our understanding of the role and political significance of spatiality in Siglo de Oro comedia.
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African American Arts
Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity
Sharrell D. Luckett
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?
Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Contributors: Carrie Mae Weems, Carmen Gillespie, Rikki Byrd, Amber Lauren Johnson, Doria E. Charlson, Florencia V. Cornet, Daniel McNeil, Lucy Caplan, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Sammantha McCalla, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Abby Dobson, J. Michael Kinsey, Shondrika Moss-Bouldin, Julie B. Johnson, Sharrell D. Luckett, Jasmine Eileen Coles, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates, Rickerby Hinds.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Age of Johnson
A Scholarly Annual (Volume 24)
Jack Lynch
Bucknell University Press, 2021
The move to a new publisher has given The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual the opportunity to recommit to what it does best: present to a wide readership cant-free scholarly articles and essays and searching book reviews, all featuring a wide variety of approaches, written by both seasoned scholars and relative newcomers. Volume 24 features commentary on a range of Johnsonian topics: his reaction to Milton, his relation to the Allen family, his notes in his edition of Shakespeare, his use of Oliver Goldsmith in his Dictionary, and his always fascinating Nachleben. The volume also includes articles on topics of strong interest to Johnson: penal reform, Charlotte Lennox's professional literary career, and the "conjectural history" of Homer in the eighteenth century.
For more than two decades, The Age of Johnson has presented a vast corpus of Johnsonian studies "in the broadest sense," as founding editor Paul J. Korshin put it in the preface to Volume 1, and it has retained the interest of a wide readership. In thousands of pages of articles, review essays, and reviews, The Age of Johnson has made a permanent contribution to our understanding of the eighteenth century, and particularly of Samuel Johnson, his circle, and his interests, and has also served as an outlet for writers who are not academics but have something important to say about the eighteenth century.
ISSN 0884-5816.
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Challenging the Black Atlantic
The New World Novels of Zapata Olivella and Gonçalves
John T. Maddox IV
Bucknell University Press, 2021
The historical novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria Gonçalves map black journeys from Africa to the Americas in a way that challenges the Black Atlantic paradigm that has become synonymous with cosmopolitan African diaspora studies. Unlike Paul Gilroy, who coined the term and based it on W.E.B. DuBois’s double consciousness, Zapata, in Changó el gran putas (1983), creates an empowering mythology that reframes black resistance in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. In Um defeito de cor (2006), Gonçalves imagines the survival strategies of a legendary woman said to be the mother of black abolitionist poet Luís Gama and a conspirator in an African Muslim–led revolt in Brazil’s “Black Rome.” These novels show differing visions of revolution, black community, femininity, sexuality, and captivity. They skillfully reveal how events preceding the UNESCO Decade of Afro-Descent (2015–2024) alter our understanding of Afro-Latin America as it gains increased visibility.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 1
Politics, Religion, Economy, and Society in Britain
Michael McKeon
Bucknell University Press, 2023
The Enlightenment has been linked to some of the most powerfully destructive developments of modern life: imperialism, racism, capitalist exploitation, scientific absolutism, totalitarian rule; and behind these developments, the domination of facts over values, quantity over quality, the abstract over the concrete, reason over humanity, division over connection. In this two-volume collection of career-spanning essays, influential literary critic Michael McKeon argues a more complicated view by practicing a different way of doing history: imagining these oppositions as the product not of the Enlightenment but of modern experience in its maturity. These essays conjure what it was like to live through the emergence of concepts and practices that are now commonplace—society, privacy, the public, the market, secularity, democracy, human rights, sex and gender, fiction, and the aesthetic attitude.
Volume 1 emphasizes the revolutionary break with tradition enacted by the British Enlightenment and the effects of its inversion of traditional hierarchies. With specific focus on economics and politics, religion and society, this collection amplifies the remarkable contribution McKeon has made to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and is an essential addition to any collection.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Volume 1 emphasizes the revolutionary break with tradition enacted by the British Enlightenment and the effects of its inversion of traditional hierarchies. With specific focus on economics and politics, religion and society, this collection amplifies the remarkable contribution McKeon has made to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, and is an essential addition to any collection.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Historicizing the Enlightenment, Volume 2
Literature, the Arts, and the Aesthetic in Britain
Michael McKeon
Bucknell University Press, 2023
Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Art of Time
Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel
Nina L Molinaro
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.
Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Robinson Crusoe after 300 Years
Andreas K E Mueller
Bucknell University Press, 2021
There is no shortage of explanations for the longevity of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which has been interpreted as both religious allegory and frontier myth, with Crusoe seen as an example of the self-sufficient adventurer and the archetypal colonizer and capitalist. Defoe’s original has been reimagined multiple times in legions of Robinsonade or castaway stories, but the Crusoe myth is far from spent. This wideranging collection brings together eleven scholars who suggest new and unfamiliar ways of thinking about this most familiar of works, and who ask us to consider the enduring appeal of “Crusoe,” more recognizable today than ever before.
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Hannah Whitman Heyde
The Complete Correspondence
Maire Mullins
Bucknell University Press, 2022
The correspondence of Hannah Whitman Heyde (1823-1908), younger sister of poet Walt Whitman, provides a rare glimpse into the life of a nineteenth-century woman. Married to well-known Vermont landscape artist Charles Louis Heyde (1820-1892), Hannah documented in letters to her mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman (1795-1873), and other family members, her lived experience of ongoing physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband. Hannah has long been characterized in biographical and scholarly studies of Whitman’s family as a neurotic and a hypochondriac—a narrative promulgated by Heyde himself—but Walt Whitman carefully preserved his sister’s letters, telling his literary biographer that his intention was to document her plight. Hannah’s complete letters, gathered here for the first time and painstakingly edited and annotated by Maire Mullins, provide an important counternarrative, allowing readers insight into the life of a real nineteenth-century woman, sister, and wife to famous men, who endured and eventually survived domestic violence.
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Louis Sébastien Mercier
Revolution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Michael J. Mulryan
Bucknell University Press, 2023
French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre, but today remains an understudied writer. In this penetrating study—the first in English devoted to Mercier in decades—Michael Mulryan explores his unpublished writings and urban chronicles, Tableau de Paris (1781-88) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798), in which he identified the city as a microcosm of national societal problems, detailed the conditions of the laboring poor, encouraged educational reform, and confronted universal social ills. Mercier’s rich writings speak powerfully to the socio-political problems that continue to afflict us as political leaders manipulate public debate and encourage absolutist thinking, deepening social divides. An outcast for his polemical views during his lifetime, Mercier has been called the founder of modern urban discourse, and his work a precursor to investigative journalism. This sensitive study returns him to his rightful place among Enlightenment thinkers.
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Reading Homer's Iliad
Kostas Myrsiades
Bucknell University Press, 2023
We still read Homer’s epic the Iliad two-and-one-half millennia since its emergence for the questions it poses and the answers it provides for our age, as viable today as they were in Homer’s own times. What is worth dying for? What is the meaning of honor and fame? What are the consequences of intense emotion and violence? What does recognition of one’s mortality teach? We also turn to Homer’s Iliad in the twenty-first century for the poet’s preoccupation with the essence of human life. His emphasis on human understanding of mortality, his celebration of the human mind, and his focus on human striving after consciousness and identity has led audiences to this epic generation after generation. This study is a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s 24 parts, meant to inform students new to the work. Endnotes clarify and elaborate on myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Iliad, in addition to bibliographies accompanying each book’s commentary.
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Reading Homer’s Odyssey
Kostas Myrsiades
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Finalist for the 2020 PROSE Awards, Classics section
Homer’s Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odyssey continues to be studied in universities and schools, and to be read and referred to by ordinary readers. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives. Among the themes discussed are hospitality, survival, wealth, reputation and immortality, the Olympian gods, self-reliance and community, civility, behavior, etiquette and technology, ease, inactivity and stagnation, Penelope’s relationship with Odysseus, Telemachus’ journey, Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality, Odysseus’ lies, Homer’s use of the House of Atreus and other myths, the cinematic qualities of the epic’s structure, women’s role in the epic, and the Odyssey’s true ending. Footnotes clarify and elaborate upon myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Odyssey, in addition to the bibliographies that accompany each book’s commentary.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Homer’s Odyssey is the first great travel narrative in Western culture. A compelling tale about the consequences of war, and about redemption, transformation, and the search for home, the Odyssey continues to be studied in universities and schools, and to be read and referred to by ordinary readers. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives. Among the themes discussed are hospitality, survival, wealth, reputation and immortality, the Olympian gods, self-reliance and community, civility, behavior, etiquette and technology, ease, inactivity and stagnation, Penelope’s relationship with Odysseus, Telemachus’ journey, Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of immortality, Odysseus’ lies, Homer’s use of the House of Atreus and other myths, the cinematic qualities of the epic’s structure, women’s role in the epic, and the Odyssey’s true ending. Footnotes clarify and elaborate upon myths that Homer leaves unfinished, explain terms and phrases, and provide background information. The volume concludes with a general bibliography of work on the Odyssey, in addition to the bibliographies that accompany each book’s commentary.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today
Judith Nantell
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Drawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Boswell and the Press
Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell
Donald J. Newman
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Boswell and the Press: Essays on the Ephemeral Writing of James Boswell is the first sustained examination of James Boswell’s ephemeral writing, his contributions to periodicals, his pamphlets, and his broadsides. The essays collected here enhance our comprehension of his interests, capabilities, and proclivities as an author and refine our understanding of how the print environment in which he worked influenced what he wrote and how he wrote it. This book will also be of interest to historians of journalism and the publishing industry of eighteenth-century Britain.
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The Aesthetic Border
Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization
Brantley Nicholson
Bucknell University Press, 2022
This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.
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The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
The Stoke Newington Edition
Maximillian E. Novak
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was almost always published together with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Only after 1950 was the first volume printed alone—a shorter work for some classes. But in addition to fulfilling the promise of the first volume, The Farther Adventures is an exciting adventure novel by itself. Crusoe returns to his island to learn about his colony, and then travels to Madagascar, India, and China before returning to England after some exciting encounters. Complete with an introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes, this is an edition like no other.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction
Maureen O'Connor
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Since the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960—a book that undermined the nation’s ideal of innocent and pious Irish girlhood—Edna O’Brien has provoked controversy in her native Ireland and abroad. Indeed, several of her early novels were condemned by church authorities and banned by the Irish government for their frank portrayals of sexual matters and the inner lives of women. Now an internationally acclaimed writer, O’Brien must be critically reassessed for a twenty-first century audience. Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction provides an urgent retrospective consideration of one of the English-speaking world’s best-selling and most prolific contemporary authors. Drawing on O’Brien’s fiction as well as archival material, and applying new theoretical approaches—including ecocritical and feminist new materialist readings—this study considers the pioneering and enduring ways O’Brien represents women’s experience, family relationships, the natural world, sex, creativity, and death, and her work’s long anticipation of contemporary movements such as #metoo.
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Johnson in Japan
Kimiyo Ogawa
Bucknell University Press, 2021
The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Narrative Mourning
Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
Kathleen M. Oliver
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Narrative Mourning explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanity’s newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person). In the six novels examined in this monograph—Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; Sarah Fielding's David Simple and Volume the Last; Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling; and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho—the appearance of the relic/relict signals narrative mourning and expresses (often obliquely) changing cultural attitudes toward the dead.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Latin American Literature at the Millennium
Local Lives, Global Spaces
Cecily Raynor
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.
[more]
Screen Time
Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age
Richard Rinehart
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Published on the occasion of the art exhibition Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age, this catalog features a selection of leading international artists who engage with and critique the role of media in contemporary society. Their work demonstrates what has become known as post-internet artistic practices—art that may or may not be made for the internet but nevertheless acknowledges online culture as an omnipresent influence, inseparable from contemporary social conditions. They ask what it means to be a photographer when everyone is an Instagram influencer; what it means to make video art when everyone is a TikTok video star; and how to deliver meaningful social commentary in the age of the meme. The exhibition and accompanying catalog showcase artwork by N. Dash, Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Peter Funch, Cyrus Kabiru, William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, Otobong Nkanga, Erwin Olaf, Robin Rhode, Vee Speers, Mary Sue, Puck Verkade, Huang Yan.
Published by Bucknell University Press for the Samek Art Museum.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press for the Samek Art Museum.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Carrie L. Ruiz
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.
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Transmedia Creatures
Frankenstein’s Afterlives
Francesca Saggini
Bucknell University Press, 2018
On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses - Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Aesthetics of Kinship
Form and Family in the Long Eighteenth Century
Heidi Schlipphacke
Bucknell University Press, 2023
The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.
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Cultivating Peace
The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
Melissa Schoenberger
Bucknell University Press, 2019
During the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change
Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder
Jennifer Smith
Bucknell University Press, 2019
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Memory Sessions
Suzanne Farrell Smith
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Suzanne Farrell Smith’s father was killed by a drunk driver when she was six, and a devastating fire nearly destroyed her house when she was eight. She remembers those two—and only those two—events from her first nearly twelve years of life. While her three older sisters hold on to rich and rewarding memories of their father, Smith recalls nothing of him. Her entire childhood was, seemingly, erased. In The Memory Sessions, Smith attempts to excavate lost childhood memories. She puts herself through multiple therapies and exercises, including psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, somatic experiencing, and acupuncture. She digs for clues in her mother’s long-stored boxes. She creates—with objects, photographs, and captions—a physical timeline to compensate for the one that’s missing in her memory. She travels to San Diego, where her family vacationed with her father right before he died. She researches, interviews, and meditates, all while facing down the two traumatic memories that defined her early life. The result is an experimental memoir that upends our understanding of the genre. Rather than recount a childhood, The Memory Sessions attempts to create one from research, archives, imagination, and the memories of others.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Faust
A Tragedy, Part I
Eugene Stelzig
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Goethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? To invoke Goethe’s own authority when speaking of his favorite author, Shakespeare, Goethe asserts that so much has already been said about the poet-dramatist “that it would seem there’s nothing left to say,” but adds, “yet it is the peculiar attribute of the spirit that it constantly motivates the spirit.” Goethe’s great dramatic poem continues to speak to us in new ways as we and our world continually change, and thus a new or updated translation is always necessary to bring to light Faust’s almost inexhaustible, mysterious, and enchanting poetic and cultural power. Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Testimony
Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Shanee Stepakoff
Bucknell University Press, 2021
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category
Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.
Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.
Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
[more]
Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District
A Geographical Text Analysis
Joanna E. Taylor
Bucknell University Press, 2022
England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.
[more]
Writing Home
A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson
Donald Ingram Ulin
Bucknell University Press, 2020
Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country.
Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.
Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s Our Cousins in Ohio (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.
Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Founders of the Future
The Science and Industry of Spanish Modernization
Óscar Iván Useche
Bucknell University Press, 2022
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.
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Political Affairs of the Heart
Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775-1800
Linda Van Netten Blimke
Bucknell University Press, 2022
Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.
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Between Market and Myth
The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992-2014
Katie J. Vater
Bucknell University Press, 2020
In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in “cultural tourism” as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors' ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Exemplary Violence
Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia
Alberto Villate-Isaza
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.
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Association and Enlightenment
Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830
Mark C. Wallace
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.
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Fire on the Water
Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886
Lenora Warren
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Woven Shades of Green
An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature
Tim Wenzell
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Woven Shades of Green is an annotated selection of literature by authors who focus on the natural world and the beauty of Ireland. It begins with the Irish monks and their largely anonymous nature poetry, written at a time when Ireland was heavily forested. A section follows devoted to the changing Irish landscape, through both deforestation and famine, including the nature poetry of William Allingham, and James Clarence Mangan, essays from Thomas Gainford and William Thackerary, and novel excerpts from William Carleton and Emily Lawless. The anthology then turns to the nature literature of the Irish Literary Revival, including Yeats and Synge, and an excerpt from George Moore’s novel The Lake. Part four shifts to modern Irish nature poetry, beginning with Patrick Kavanaugh, and continuing with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and others. Finally, the anthology concludes with a section on various Irish naturalist writers, and the unique prose and philosophical nature writing of John Moriarty, followed by a comprehensive list of environmental organizations in Ireland, which seek to preserve the natural beauty of this unique country.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Odysseys of Recognition
Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist
Ellwood Wiggins
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Literary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Pretexts for Writing
German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy
Seán M. Williams
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Around 1800, print culture became a particularly rich source for metaphors about thinking as well as writing, nowhere more so than in the German tradition of Dichter und Denker. Goethe, Jean Paul, and Hegel (among many others) used the preface in order to reflect on the problems of writing itself, and its interpretation. If Sterne teaches us that a material book enables mind games as much as it gives expression to them, the Germans made these games more theoretical still. Weaving in authors from Antiquity to Agamben, Williams shows how European–and, above all, German–Romanticism was a watershed in the history of the preface. The playful, paradoxical strategies that Romantic writers invented are later played out in continental philosophy, and in post-Structuralist literature. The preface is a prompt for playful thinking with texts, as much as it is conventionally the prosaic product of such an exercise.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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The Unexpected Dante
Perspectives on the Divine Comedy
Lucia Alma Wolf
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Dante Alighieri’s long poem The Divine Comedy has been one of the foundational texts of European literature for over 700 years. Yet many mysteries still remain about the symbolism of this richly layered literary work, which has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries.
The Unexpected Dante brings together five leading scholars who offer fresh perspectives on the meanings and reception of The Divine Comedy. Some investigate Dante’s intentions by exploring the poem’s esoteric allusions to topics ranging from musical instruments to Roman law. Others examine the poem’s long afterlife and reception in the United States, with chapters showcasing new discoveries about Nicolaus de Laurentii’s 1481 edition of Commedia and the creative contemporary adaptations that have relocated Dante’s visions of heaven and hell to urban American settings.
This study also includes a guide that showcases selected treasures from the extensive Dante collections at the Library of Congress, illustrating the depth and variety of The Divine Comedy’s global influence. The Unexpected Dante is thus a boon to both Dante scholars and aficionados of this literary masterpiece.
Published by Bucknell University Press in association with the Library of Congress. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Unexpected Dante brings together five leading scholars who offer fresh perspectives on the meanings and reception of The Divine Comedy. Some investigate Dante’s intentions by exploring the poem’s esoteric allusions to topics ranging from musical instruments to Roman law. Others examine the poem’s long afterlife and reception in the United States, with chapters showcasing new discoveries about Nicolaus de Laurentii’s 1481 edition of Commedia and the creative contemporary adaptations that have relocated Dante’s visions of heaven and hell to urban American settings.
This study also includes a guide that showcases selected treasures from the extensive Dante collections at the Library of Congress, illustrating the depth and variety of The Divine Comedy’s global influence. The Unexpected Dante is thus a boon to both Dante scholars and aficionados of this literary masterpiece.
Published by Bucknell University Press in association with the Library of Congress. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[more]
Antigone's Ghosts
The Long Legacy of War and Genocide in Five Countries
Mark A. Wolfgram
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the perpetual problems of human societies, families, and individuals who are caught up in the terrible aftermath of mass violence. What is one to do after the killing has stopped? What can be done to prevent a round of new violence? The tragic and dramatic tension in the play is put in motion by setting an unyielding Antigone against King Creon. As we see through the investigation of how Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey have dealt with their histories of mass violence and genocide in the 20th century, the forces represented by Antigone and Creon remain very much part of our world today. Through a comparison of the five countries, their political institutions, and cultural traditions, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Alimentary Orientalism
Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East
Yin Yuan
Bucknell University Press, 2023
What, exactly, did tea, sugar, and opium mean in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain? Alimentary Orientalism reassesses the politics of Orientalist representation by examining the contentious debates surrounding these exotic, recently popularized, and literally consumable things. It suggests that the interwoven discourses sparked by these commodities transformed the period’s literary Orientalism and created surprisingly self-reflexive ways through which British writers encountered and imagined cultural otherness. Tracing exotic ingestion as a motif across a range of authors and genres, the book considers how, why, and whither writers used scenes of eating, drinking, and smoking to diagnose and interrogate their own solipsistic constructions of the Orient. As national and cultural boundaries became increasingly porous, such self-reflexive inquiries into the nature and role of otherness provided an unexpected avenue for British imperial subjectivity to emerge and coalesce.
[more]
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