Books published by Bucknell University Press

A stylish critique of literary attitudes towards painting, TextualVision explores the simultaneous rhetorical formation and empirical fragmentation of visual reading in enlightenment Britain. Beginning with an engaging treatment of Popes Rape of the Lock, Timothy Erwin takes the reader on a guided tour of the pointed allusion, apt illustration, or the subtle appeal to the minds eye within a wide array of genres and texts, before bringing his linked case studies to a surprising close with the fiction of Jane Austen. At once carefully researched, theoretically informed and highly imaginative, Textual Vision situates textual vision at the cultural crossroads of ancient pictura-poesis doctrine and modernist aesthetics. It provides reliable interpretive poles for reading enlightenment imagery, offers vivid new readings of familiar works, and promises to invigorate the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century visual culture.

The fourteen essays in this volume share new and evolving knowledge, theories, and observations about the city of Athens or the region of Attica. The contents include essays on topography, architecture, religion and cult, sculpture, ceramic studies, iconography, epigraphy, trade, and drama.

This volume takes a fresh look at the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the wider impact of imaginative literature on Enlightenment culture in general. Covering key authors and work in areas as varied as philosophy, medicine, travel writing, religion, drama, history, publishing, and the periodical press, it provides scholars and students with a timely re-evaluation of the links between imaginative literature and the larger project of Enlightenment in Scotland and beyond.

This book analyzes the literary production of Spanish writers who place the global economic crisis at the center of their writing. This is the first comprehensive study of crisis literature, which is a genre that arose in response to the transformation of the European welfare state by the forces of liquid capital.

This work focuses on rural community versions of Spanish Early Modern Theatre and deals with cultural heritage and the contemporary impact of Golden Age theatre on local rural communities. To this end, I examine the burgeoning of annual rural Golden Age theatre festivals that generate site-centered, non-professional productions of the plays, and revisit the conflict between tradition and innovation, between popular and high culture between authority of literary heritage and the peoples right to the canon. The selection of Early Modern plays set in actual Spanish communitiesFuenteovejuna, El Alcalde de Zalamea, Numancia and Los tres blasones de Espaarenders an overview of the effect of these important works on their respective communities and focuses on the theatrical festivals as peripheral, subaltern, hybrid cultural phenomena. I take into consideration not only traditional and significant studies on these four renowned plays, but recent theories on staging, performance and popular reception and agency.The research involved crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries between literature, history, geography, and politics by centering on the appropriation and re-examination of a past that is continuously revised through contemporary performance, and which is adjusted to fit the needs and desires of the context in which it is interpreted. This diachronic approach allows for a new perspective on contemporary performances which question cultural politics, redefine tradition and transcend geo-political boundaries.

This book traces the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject back to the Enlightenment period in Britain to show how the very concept of political agency was shaped by anti-effeminate ideas and beliefs. This study queers our understanding of the political subject, which is still the basis for debate and argument.

The economic crisis in Argentina in 2001-2002 that spilled over into Uruguay causing fiscal and political problems is the starting point for my research on space and theater, and it demonstrates why we must look at the River Plate in both global and local ways. Connections among monetary policies, industries, and legal, social, and political movements mean that national spaces like Uruguay's are fraught with tensions that come from both within and outside of borders. Recent economic crises like the one that is occurring in Greece, further demonstrate how nation states and trade blocks must constantly negotiate power as they toggle between national and international pressures. Nation states are being prompted to reconceive perspectives on governance that fall away from the parameters of Westphalian autonomy and reconcile their views with trends that instead require thinking about power as a network with shifting centers. The introduction launches the study by addressing these political and economic trends, the spatial turn in theater and performance studies, the rise of multiculturalism, and also examines the Uruguayan historical context of the post-dictatorship and impunity laws that pit national sovereignty against international human rights laws. These crises are enacted on the Uruguayan stage and contextualized through networks and spatial topographies, intertextualties on the page, explorations of history and memory, and ultimately notions of identity in four areas: the postdramatic and economic realm (chapter one: Peveroni), cultural geography and pyschogeography (chapter two: Morena), midrash and questions of human rights and growing fascist trends (chapter three: Sanguinetti), and finally in mapmaking on the stage through mise-en-perf/performise and ';wayfinding' through sites of contested power (chapter four: Calderon). The concluding chapter (Blanco) looks at the reinterpretation of Greek tragedy as a commentary on the messy process of democratization. Here, access to the polis and power are problematized through the lens of international sex trafficking and gendered roles that exclude portions of the populace from participation in the process of self-governance.

The Cuban writer Nicols Guillen has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillen's work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities. Miguel Arnedo-Gomez explores this paradox in Guillen's pre-Cuban Revolution writings placing them alongside contemporaneous intellectual discourses that feigned adherence to the homogenizing ideology whilst upholding black interests. On the basis of links with these and other 1930s Cuban discourses, Arnedo-Gomez shows Guillen's work to contain a message of black unity aimed at the black middle classes. Furthermore, against a tendency to seek a single authorial consciousnessbe it mulatto or based on a North American construction of blacknessGuillen's prose and poetry are also characterized as a struggle for a viable identity in a socio-culturally heterogeneous society.

Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Bannockburn is a collection of new interdisciplinary essays interrogating the trans-historical myths of nation, belonging and martial identity that shaped Scotland's encounter with the First World War. In a series of thematically linked essays, experts from the fields of literature, history and cultural studies examine how Scotland remembers war, and how remembering war has shaped Scotland.

Imperial Tapestries represents a transnational approach to questions of monarchical power and literary form in early modern Europe. In line with Barbara Fuchs's recent call for considerations of center versus periphery in Old World contexts, it explores the ways in which some of the most significant authors of the early modern era questioned the structures of Spanish Habsburg authority through ';imperial texts'texts that call attention to their organizational processin order to mirror authors' perceptions of the structures of Habsburg power.With a contextual basis in Fuchs' notion of imperium studies, ideas of self-fashioning, and theories of early modern reading, the study explores the ways in which complex narrative forms in the early modern period reflected the concerns with the structures of Habsburg imperial power subtly portrayed within the narratives themselves. A close reading of the various strands that form the tapestries of the texts at issue reveals a deep undercurrent of misgivings toward various manifestations of Spanish Habsburg power on the part of authors who had experienced its effects first-hand. Whether the complex narrative devices in question cast the Habsburg monarchs as monster, misogynist, sorceress, aloof shepherdess, or mad would-be knight errant, they all have one thing in common: the spatialized forms that they create correspond directly with the ways in which the authors in question perceive the more disillusioning aspects of Habsburg hegemony. Authors studied in the volume include Ludovico Ariosto, Garcilaso de la Vega, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel de Cervantes, and Mara de Zayas.

In Media Res is a collection of critical essays and creative works that wrestle with key issues in twenty-first-century popular culture, including race, technology, gender, media, and politics. Its scope and coverage of a wide range of popular issues make this book a powerful introduction to popular culture studies in the contemporary moment.

Masculinity is not a monolithic phenomenon, but a historically discontinuous onea fabrication as it were, of given cultural circumstances. Because of its opacity and instability, masculinity, like more recognizable systems of oppression, resists discernibility. In Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative, Jason Cortes seeks to reveal the inner workings of masculinity in the narrative prose of four major Caribbean authors: the Cuban Severo Sarduy; the Dominican American Junot Daz; and the Puerto Ricans Luis Rafael Snchez and Edgardo Rodrguez Juli. By exploring the relationship between ethics and authority, the legacies of colonial violence, the figure of the dictator, the macho, and the dandy, the logic of the Archive, the presence of Oscar Wilde, and notions of trauma and mourning, Macho Ethics fills a gap surrounding issues of power and masculinity within the Caribbean context, and draws attention to what frequently remains invisible and unspoken.

The book reviews the varied cultural accomplishments during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714), including scholarly essays on Anne, her patronage of the arts, coin collecting, poetry, poetical miscellanies, drama, hymns, music, and architecture.

Stage Mothers expands the discussion of eighteenth-century women's social and dramatic roles by demonstrating the complicated, contradictory, and celebratory faces of maternity on stage and on the page. This collection examines and extends recent debates in women's history, theater history, and eighteenth-century literature and drama.

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminalityidentity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neithercaused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fictionboth their structure and their intentionalityLiminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernndez Cubas, Javier Maras, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World consists of ten chapters that examine the representation of political, economic, military and symbolic power both in Spain and the New World under the Habsburgs.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, selfhood was understood as a ';tabula rasa' to be imprinted in the course of an individual's life. By the middle of the nineteenth-century, however, the individual had become defined as determined by heredity already from birth. Examining novels by Goethe, Jean Paul, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, studies on plant hybridization, treatises on animal breeding, and anatomical collections, Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity delineates how romantic authors imagined the ramifications of emerging notions of heredity for the conceptualization of selfhood. Focusing on three fields of inquiryinbreeding and incest, cross-breeding and bastardization, evolution and autopoiesisChristine Lehleiter proposes that the notion of selfhood for which Romanticism has become known was not threatened by considerations of determinism and evolution, but was in fact already a result of these very considerations. Romanticism, Origins and the History of Heredity will be of interest for literary scholars, historians of science, and all readers fascinated by the long duree of subjectivity and evolutionary thought.

An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento's invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women's education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country's Belle poque. The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman's life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman's rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.

Rhetorics of Religion in American Fiction considers the way in which contemporaryAmerican authors address the subject of belief in the post-9/11 Age of Terror. Naydansuggests that after 9/11, fiction by Mohsin Hamid, Laila Halaby, Philip Roth, DonDeLillo, John Updike, and Barbara Kingsolver dramatizes and works to resolve impassesthat exist between believers of different kinds at the extremes. These impasses emergeout of the religious paradox that shapes America as simultaneously theocratic andsecular, and they exist, for instance, between liberals and fundamentalists, betweenliberals and certain evangelicals, between fundamentalists and artists, and betweenfundamentalists of different varieties. Ultimately, Naydan argues that these authorsfunction as literary theologians of sorts and forge a relevant space beyond or betweenextremes. They fashion faith or lack thereof as hybridized and hence as a negotiationamong secularism, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, and fanaticism. In so doing, theyinvite their readers into contemplations of religious difference and new ways ofmemorializing 9/11.

Memoir is Rosario Ferre's account of her life both as a writer and as a member of a family at the center of the economic and political history of Puerto Rico during the American Century, one hundred years of territorial "non-incorporation" into the United States.

This is the first book in English on Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay 1878-Argentina 1937), a canonical author whose works are read by all advanced students of Spanish in the US and many other countries. The study examines Quiroga's work through the theoretical lens of the heroica lens elaborated in part by means of Quiroga's own disquisitions on the subjectand the complementary phenomenon of the monstrous. This lens serves to elucidate many evidently obscure and self-contradictory aspects of Quiroga's work and its relation to the context in which he lived. That context included the neo-colonial social and economic milieu of Argentina's fast-changing, immigrant-charged, increasingly materialistic society; the growing influence of foreign cultural discourses, particularly Hollywood film; the conflict between the genders in a society that embraced modernity but resisted changes in gender roles; the weight of new scientific discourses, especially Darwinian evolution, in social and political thought; and the impact on pedagogical theory and practice of these multiple changing discourses. This study discloses the extraordinary range of Quiroga's work, which includes erotic romance, science fiction and fantasy, psychological occult, social satire, a great variety of juvenile literature, outdoor adventure andmost familiar to readers in the United Statesgothic and naturalist horror. The book concludes that Quiroga's consistent imperative of the heroic is essential to reconciling these various, evidently incompatible aspects of Quiroga's poetics, revealing its theoretical and ethical coherence.

Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain's own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. In the last twenty-five years, Spain has gone from being a country of net emigration to one in which immigrants make up nearly 12 percent of the population. This rapid growth has made migrants increasingly visible in both mass media and in Spanish visual and literary culture. This book examines the origins of media discourses on immigration and takes the analysis of contemporary Spanish culture as its primary framework, while also drawing insights from sociology and history. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders introduces readers to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider contemporary Spain through its varied encounters with migrants. It follows the stages of the migrant's own journey, beginning outside Spanish territory, continuing across the border (either at the barbed-wire fences of Ceuta and Melilla or the waters of the Atlantic or the Strait of Gibraltar), and then considers what happens to migrants after they arrive and settle in Spain. Each chapter analyzes one of these stages in order to illustrate the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity. This examination of Spanish culture shows how Spain is evolving into a new space of imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migranta space in which there is no unified identity but rather a new self-understanding is being born. Vega-Durn both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique. She argues that Spain cannot be understood today outside the Transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces (both real and imaginary) where Spaniards and migrants meet. Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders offers a timely study of present-day Spain, and makes an original contribution to the vibrant debates about multiculturalism and nation-formation that are taking

Ridiculous Critics offers an outline of eighteenth-century literary criticism that questions its image as a civilized practice of cultural refinement and esteem. No longer the equable narrative of texts having consistently serious content and purpose, this history highlights the contempt, jocularity, irony, and buffoonery that equally make up the critical spirit of the period. Laughter's scandalous intrusions and corrections are pertinent today when puritanical solemnities of every kind claim the soul of critical writing.

Though his name might not be familiar to many twenty-first century readers, Laurence Whyte (d.1753) is an important missing link in eighteenth-century IrelandΓÇÖs literary and musical histories. A rural poet who established himself in Dublin as a teacher of mathematics and as an active member (and poetic chronicler) of the much admired and supported Charitable Musical Society, Whyte was a poet of considerable talent and dexterity, and his body of work yields a wealth of insight into the intersecting cultures of his time and place. Published in 1740 and 1742, WhyteΓÇÖs writing, by turns humorous and poignant, insightful and nostalgic, straddled the worlds of Gaelic and Anglo-Irish, of the rural midlands and the capital, of Catholic and Protestant. Some of the dualities explored in his verse were present, to varying extents, in the work of Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. In matters poetical, political and cultural, Whyte is an important, though as yet neglected and unstudied, figure. This edition, comprehensively introduced and annotated, retrieves him from that neglect.

What does heredity mean for identity? What role does the individual have in shaping a personal or a human history? What is the ethical status of seemingly biologically determined behaviours? What does individual death mean in the light of species extinction? Autobiologies explores the importance of such questions in Victorian life writing. Analysing memoirs, diaries, letters, and natural histories Alexis Harley demonstrates how theories of natural selection shaped nineteenth-century autobiographical practices and refashioned the human subjectand also how the lived experience of the individual theorist simultaneously impacted their biological formulations.

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century is a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores philosophy, biography, and texts about and by disabled people living in the eighteenth century. The book, which introduces and affirms the notion that disability studies predates most United States and United Kingdom findings by more than a hundred years, will be of interest to philosophers, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars.

This book investigates the perceptions of motherhood in Spanish author Luca Etxebarria's fiction and offers views of the importance of motherhood in society. Traditional expectations for women as mothers persist despite the fact that they no longer match Spain's cultural and economic reality. These issues of gender equality and societal perceptions stand out in the novels and screenplays of Etxebarria. Her work at times resists and at times affirms patriarchal constructs associated with traditional Spanish motherhood, and ultimately, I argue, enacts the very complexity of contemporary Spanish motherhood ideals. By showing the tension between the past constructs of the mother and the possible future outcomes of gender equality, Etxebarria's works navigate the complexity between past and future, illuminating the current and future uncertainties and the ambivalent nature of change. Each chapter views motherhood from a different perspective and focuses on particular works of Etxebarria. Through the depiction of a variety of mother characters, these different perspectives, as showcased in Etxebarria's narratives, together compose an understanding of Spanish maternal identity.

How did it happen that whole regions of Latin AmericaAmazonia, Patagonia, the Caribbeanare named for monstrous races of women warriors, big-footed giants and cannibals? Through history, monsters inhabit human imaginings of discovery and creation, and also degeneration, chaos, and death. Latin America's most dynamic monsters can be traced to archetypes that are found in virtually all of the worlds sacred traditions, but only in Latin America did Amazons, cannibals, zombies, and other monsters become enduring symbols of regional history, character, and identity. From Amazons to Zombies presents a comprehensive account of the qualities of monstrosity, the ways in which monsters function within and among cultures, and theories and genres of the monstrous. It describes the genesis and evolution of monsters in the construction and representation of Latin America from the Ancient world and early modern Iberia to the present.