Books published by Bucknell University Press

The sixth volume of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents for the first time writing from the final years of Brown's life, including from his magisterial periodical project, the American Register, in which Brown narrates a contemporary history of the United States and Europe during the Napoleonic Wars.

The fourth volume of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents the political pamphlets and related writings of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), a key writer of the U.S. early republic. The texts address the national and wider global contexts of the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson's Embargo, accompanied by historical commentary.

Postracial America? argues that the notion of "postracial" does not begin with the election of Barack Obama, nor will it end with his administration. The "postracial" is an expression of the protean nature of white supremacy in America, and the articles collected here demonstrate the variations of this seemingly innocuous and salutary expression.

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world's greatest literary hero takes place in film, theater, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject.

The seventh volume of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown showcases a comprehensive collection of his poetry. While Brown is well known as a novelist, his poetry has never before been collected and many of the works included in this book appear in print for the first time in two hundred years.

The third volume of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents a selection of Brown's published writings between 1801 and 1807. The majority of the volume is devoted to texts that appeared in The Literary Magazine, and American Register, which Brown edited from October 1803 to December 1807, through fifty-one issues.

Rewriting Franco's Spain proposes a new reading of some of the most culturally significant and closely studied works of Spanish memory fiction from the past seventy years. This book explores how the work of the French writer Marcel Proust has shaped the ways Spanish novelists write about the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship.

This book focuses on Jose Marti's reflections and critique of social, cultural, and political events in the United States between the years of 1880 and 1895, bringing together some of the most recognized scholars from the United States, Cuba, South America, and Europe studying Marti in a unique contribution and collaborative international effort.

Strangers at the Gate promises, for the first time, to examine culture since 9/11 from the perspective of hospitality. It asks new questions about how we engage with others and strangers and claims hospitality as an imperative political concern as well as a social, cultural, and ethical one.

This book studies the phenomenon of "cultural transfer" via a gallery of case studies from Europe's early modernity. Perhaps its most original feature is to relate the European phenomenon to events in Europe's "East" (Central Europe) and developing practices of European Orientalism in the Middle East and India.

This book explores practices of recollection in contemporary Argentina that helped define the nation's approach to transitional justice in the first decades of the twenty-first century and enhances the critical literature on historical memory and trauma in Latin America by integrating affect theory to cultural representations of state violence.

Jane Austen and Masculinity provides a diverse selection of critical essays on representations of men and masculinity in Austen's work. This anthology will attract interest from scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature as well as gender studies scholars who are interested in the widening scope of masculinity studies.

This book is a unique scholarly attempt to examine Don Quixote from multiple angles to see how the re-accentuation of the world's greatest literary hero takes place in film, theater, and literature. To accomplish this task, eighteen scholars have come together, and each of them has brought his/her unique perspective to the subject.

British Romanticism and the Literature of Human Interest investigates the generic structures of Romantic literature and the negotiation of the status of literature in the period in relation to a new media landscape. This book explores the self-theorization of Romantic literature and argues for its value to contemporary literary criticism.

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse by Antjie Krog is the first English translation of an award winning book published in Afrikaans in 1989. It engages critically and creatively with a key moment of colonial historythe time Lady Anne Barnard spent at the Cape of Good Hope, from 1797 to 1802. Usually mentioned merely as a witty hostess of fabulous parties, Anne Lindsay Barnard, the daughter of a Scottish Earl and the wife of a colonial administrator, was an independent thinker and a painter and writer of genius. She left diaries, correspondence and watercolors documenting her experiences in this exotic land, the contact zone of colonizers and indigenous peoples. Antjie Krog acts as bard and chronicles an epic about this remarkable heroine's life in South Africa, and intertwines it with life two hundred years later in the same country but now in the throes of anti-apartheid anger and vicious states of emergency. Krog's powerful and eloquent bringing together of the past and the present, and the historical and the poetic embodies an experience that is as pertinent and compelling today in a democratic but still turbulent South Africa, as it is in the USA and other places where the intersections of race, identity, power, and language lie at the center of civic life.

From the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance to the souvenir collections of today, selecting, accumulating, and organizing objects are practices that are central to our notions of who we are and what we value. Collecting, both private and institutional, has been instrumental in the consolidation of modern notions of the individual and of the nation, and numerous studies have discussed its complex political, social, economic, anthropological, and psychological implications. However, studies of collecting as practiced in colonized cultures are few, since the role of these cultures has usually been understood as that of purveyors of objects for the metropolitan collector.Collecting from the Margins: Material Culture in a Latin American Context seeks to counter the historical understanding of collecting that posits the metropolis as collecting subject and the colonial or postcolonial society as supplier of collectible objects by asking instead how collecting has been practiced and understood in Latin America. Has collecting been viewed or portrayed differently in a Latin American context? Does the act of collecting, when viewed from a Latin American perspective, unsettle the way we have become accustomed to think about it? What differences, if any, arise in the activity of collecting in colonized or previously colonial societies?Spanning the period after the independence wars until the 1980s, this collection of ten essays addresses a broad range of examples of collecting practices in Latin America. Collecting during the nineteenth century is addressed in discussions of the creation of the first national museums of Argentina and Colombia in the post-independence period, as well as in analyses of the private collections of modernistas such as Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Ruben Daro, Jose Asuncion Silva, and Delmira Agustini at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The practice of collecting in the twentieth century is discussed in analyses of the self-described revolutionary practices of Oswald de Andrade, Augusto de Campos and the films of Ruy Guerra, as well as the polemical collections of Pablo Neruda, and the unsettling collections portrayed in Gabriel Garca Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Mina Loypoet, artist, exile, and luminarywas a prominent and admired figure in the art and literary circles of Paris, Florence, and New York in the early years of the twentieth century. But over time, she gradually receded from public consciousness and her poetry went out of print. As part of the movement to introduce the work of this cryptic poet to modern audiences, Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy provides new and detailed explications of Loy's most redolent poems. This book helps readers gain a better understanding of the body of Loy's work as a whole by offering compelling close readings that uncover the source materials that inspired Loy's poetry, including modern artwork, Baedeker travel guides, and even long-forgotten cultural venues. Helpfully keyed to the contents of Loy's Lost Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover, this book is an essential aid for new readers and scholars alike. Mina Loy forged a legacy worthy of serious considerationthrough a practice best understood as salvage work, of reclaiming what has been so long obscured. Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy dives deep to bring hidden treasures to the surface.

This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes's literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought: ';superfluity' and the ';poetics of transition,' concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes's dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the ';canon' of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.

We all think we know what a dictionary is for and how to use one, so most of us skip the first pagesthe front matterand go right to the words we wish to look up. Yet dictionary users have not always known how English ';works' and my book reproduces and examines for the first time important texts in which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionary authors explain choices and promote ideas to readers, their ';end users.' Unlike French, Spanish, and Italian dictionaries compiled during this time and published by national academies, the goal of English dictionaries was usually not to ';purify' the language, though some writers did attempt to regularize it. Instead, English lexicographers aimed to teach practical ways for their users to learn English, improve their language skills, even transcend their social class. The anthology strives to be comprehensive in its coverage of the first phase of this tradition from the early seventeenth centuryfrom Robert Cawdrey's (1604) A Table Alphabeticall, to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), and finally, to Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). The book puts English dictionaries in historical, national, linguistic, literary, cultural contexts, presenting lexicographical trends and the change in the English language over two centuries, and examines how writers attempted to control it by appealing to various pedagogical and legal authorities. Moreover, the development of dictionary and attempts to codify English language and grammar coincided with the arc of the British Empire; the promulgation of ';proper' English has been a subject of debate and inquiry for centuries and, in part, dictionaries and the teaching of English historically have been used to present and support ideas about what is correct, regardless of how and where English is actually used. The authors who wrote these texts apply ideas about capitalism, nationalism, sex and social status to favor one language theory over another. I show how dictionaries are not neutral documents: they challenge or promote biases. The book presents and analyzes the history of lexicography, demonstrating how and why dictionaries evolved into the reference books we now often take for granted and we can see that there is no easy answer to the question of ';who owns English.'

Sovereign Power and the Enlightenment examines the role of the novelists and historians of the eighteenth century in developing a vision of political modernity that questions traditional narratives about the rise of liberalism and the decline of sovereign power. It provides a new way to link the literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century with the meditations on violence and sovereignty that have preoccupied much of the political philosophy of the first years of the twenty first century. Focusing on the novelists Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Ann Radcliffe, and on the historians David Hume and Edward Gibbon, DeGabriele shows how these authors use the resources of their respective genres to expose the persistence of sovereign violence and to outline a type of political subject who could resist the violence more effectively than the individual beloved of modern liberalism.

In Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, Paul Kelleher revises the history of sexuality from the vantage point of the literary history of sentimentalism. Kelleher demonstrates how eighteenth-century British philosophers, essayists, and novelists fundamentally reconceived the relations among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is his contention that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary, posited heterosexual desire as the precondition of moral feeling and conduct. The author further suggests that sentimental writers fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to the theories of self-love and self-interest found in the works of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire and its culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as the privileged means for an individual to transcend self-love and to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At the same time, Kelleher suggests, other pleasures and desiresparticularly those rooted in same-sex eroticismwere increasingly depicted as antithetical to conjugal love and, thus, were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. Kellehers argument unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts, including Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's the Tatler and the Spectator, Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Although these texts embody diverse rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns, he shows how they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology: on the one hand, heterosexual desire and conjugal love become synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, while on the other hand, same-sex desire is pathologized as a selfish withdrawal from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and ultimately, ';humanity' itself.

John Locke asked, ';since all things that exist are merely particulars, how come we by general terms?' Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-Scottish Literature, 16031832 tells a story about aesthetics and politics that looks back to the 1603 Union of Crowns and James VI/I's emigration from Edinburgh to London. Considering the emergence of British unionism alongside the literary rise of both description and ';the individual,' Rivka Swenson builds on extant scholarship with original close readings that illuminate the inheritances of 1603, a date of considerable but untraced importance in Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural history whose legacies are still being negotiated today. The 1603 Union of Crowns spurred interest in exploring the aesthetic politics of unionism in relation to an alleged Scottish essence that could be manipulated to resist or support ';Britishness,' even as the king's emigration generated a legacy of gendered representations of traveling Scots and ';Scotlands-left-behind.' Discussing writers such as Bacon, Defoe, Smollett, Johnson, Macpherson, Ferrier, and Scott along with lesser-known or forgotten popular authors (and ballads, transparencies, newspapers, joke books, cant dictionaries, political speeches, histories, travel narratives, engravings, material artifacts such as medals and snuffboxes), Essential Scots describes the years 1603 to 1832 as a crucial period in British history. Paradoxically, the political and cultural exploration of ideas about ';unionism' in relation to a supposed ';essential Scottishness' participated in the increasing prominence of both description and the ';individual' in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; Swenson persuasively concludes that essential Scottishness (as both ';identity' and symbolism) was refigured to mediate a national synthesis between the emergent individual and the nascent British nationas well as the naturalized, even de-politicized, literary synthesis of particulars within putatively analogous narrative wholes.

Playing the Martyr is a book about the interplay between theater and religion in early modern France. Challenging the standard narrative of modernity as a process of increased secularization Christopher Semk demonstrates the centrality of religious thought and practices to the development of neoclassical poetics. Engaging with a broad corpus of religious plays, poetic treatises, devotional literature, and contemporary theory, Semk shows that religion was a vital interlocutor in early modern discussions concerning the definition of verisimilitude, the nature and purpose of spectacle, the mechanics of acting, and the position of the spectator. Well researched and persuasively argued, Playing the Martyr makes the case for a more complicated approach to the relationship between religion and literature, namely, one that does not treat religion as a theme deployed within literary works, but as an active player in literary invention. Indeed, it makes the case for a serious reconsideration of the role that religion plays in the development of modern, secular literary forms.

Every major Peruvian author of the twentieth century has written a narrative focused on childhood or coming of age. Mining Memory argues that Peruvian narratives of the twentieth century re-imagine childhood not only to document personal pasts, but also to focus on national identity as a dynamic and incomplete process. Mining Memory shows how 20th-century narratives and films reimagine the self and the nation by representing child and adolescent protagonists and their evolution, using the remembrance of childhood as part of a nation-making project. The book demonstrates how, in the context of Peru, fictions focusing on childhood become vehicles for the national reimagining and collective remembering central to much of Latin American literature. The figure of the child, as emblem of both a collective memory and an always deferred utopian project, holds special promise for twentieth-century Peruvian writers as they write from a national context rife with cultural, racial and political conflict. The book intervenes in debates internal to Peruvian cultural studies as well as wider conversations in Latin American Studies and post-colonial studies. Mining Memory provides a new understanding to both the Latin American and Anglo-American traditions regarding the representations of national subjectivities through the voices of the child and adolescent. Such a representational strategy performs a very particular kind of hybridity and temporal balancing act capable of addressing the very issues of cultural memory and fractured identities so relevant to multi-cultural, post-colonial cultural contexts.