Books published by Bucknell University Press

This book examines strategies of transformation (becomings, image-making, and the phantasmagoric) that figure in four stories and a novel by Gothic fiction writer Pilar Pedraza (Spain, 1951). While critics have long associated the Bildungsroman with Gothic fiction, this study takes a close look at the developmental process itself: the means by which a protagonist, young or old, might transcend a deprived status to achieve a complete sense of self. Pedrazas works imply that, regardless of the path followed, a characters ability to think differently is crucial to progress. The fixed image, representative of an inflexible, socially determined mindset, arises as an obstacle to maturation. In Das de perros, for example, a triangular arrangement of coins in a cigar box elucidates the connection between individual lives and the social order or assemblage. Literary texts, such as this one, serve as collective assemblages of enunciation, capable of exposing fixed images as powerful instruments of control. Tristes Ayes del guila Mejicana discovers fixed images among the icons of Colonial Spains exequias reales, used in this case to territorialize the evolving identity of indigenous peoples.The territory that Pedrazas fiction best illuminates is, in reality, the image. When images remain fixed or territorialized, they uncannily infect the assemblages over which they exert influence. Placing emphasis on images that impact women, Pedraza, in Anfiteatro, for example, deconstructs cat woman, which, albeit a potentially subversive image in its early manifestations, eventually ceases to empower the feminine, lashing it, rather, to a burdensome stereotype. Territorialized, the feminine must, then, break free from the image in order to discover representations more capable of illuminating present-day challenges.The phrase dark assemblages, drawn from Deleuze and Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus, gestures toward societal stagnation as a decisive factor in individual evolvement. Gothic fiction represents an uneven landscape, in that it tenders the possibility of a social critique yet, equally well, lends itself to the exclusion of specific identities and practices that society brands as anomalous. Pedrazas Gothic fiction is, indeed, subversive, in that it offers readers original perceptions of modern day people and the assemblages, dark or otherwise, to which they belong.

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.

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encountersthe conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizuresthat have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of ';confluence narratives,' Tosta argues that the ';contemporary' nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of ';otherness' in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.

This volume explores the many dimensions of the work of Joseph P. Fell. Drawing from continental sources such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as North American thinkers such as John William Miller, Fell has secured a place as an enduring and important thinker within the tradition of phenomenological thought. Fell's critical development of these strands of philosophy has resulted in a provocative and original challenge to complacent dualism and persistent problems of skepticism, alienation, and nihilism.

Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing examines the intricate bond between poetry and history writing that shaped the theory and practice of empire in early colonial Spanish-American society. The book explores from diverse perspectives how epic and heroic poetry served to construe a new Spanish-American elite of original explorers and conquistadors in Juan de Castellanos's Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. Similarly, this book offers an interpretation of Castellanos's writings that shows his critical engagement with the reformist project postulated in Alonso de Ercilla's LaAraucana, and it elucidates the complex poetic discourse Castellanos created to defend the interests of the early generation of explorers and conquistadors in the aftermath of the promulgation of the New Laws and the mounting criticism of the institution of the encomienda. Within the larger context of a new poetics of imperialistic expansion, this book shows how the Elegies offers one of the earliest examples of the reconfiguration of some of the main tenets of Petrarchism/Garcilacism, as well as the bold transmutation of dominant poetic discourses that had until then been typically associated with the nobility. Focusing on the practice of poetic imitation (imitatio) and the themes of authority, piracy, and captivity, this book shows the transformation undergone by heroic poetry owing to Europe's encounter with America and illustrates the contribution of learned heroic verse to the emergence of a Spanish-American literary tradition.

Espectros is a collection of original scholarly studies on contemporary literature and film in Spanish and by authors of Latin American descent. Contributors contemplate ghosts, haunting, the spectral, and absence as central motifs in narratives that deal with the aftermath of collective or individual trauma, affect in visual and material culture, and the economic and social pressures of globalization and neoliberal economics.

Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth-century British authors.

Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M. Leichman argues for a new understanding of the relationship between performance and self. Innovative interpretations of La Chaussee, Rousseau, Diderot, Retif, Beaumarchais, and others demonstrate how the figure of the actor threatened ancien regime moral hierarchies by decoupling affect from emotion. As acting came to be understood as an embodied practice of individual freedom, attempts to alternately perfect and repress it proliferated. Across religious diatribes and sentimental comedies, technical manuals and epistolary novels, Leichman traces the development of early modern acting theories that define the aesthetics, philosophy, and politics of the performed subject. Acting Up weaves together cultural studies, literary analysis, theater history, and performance studies to establish acting as a key conceptual model for the subject, for the Enlightenment, and for our own time.

Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women analyzes five novels by women writers that present women's experiences during and after the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, highlighting the struggles of female protagonists of different ages to confront an unresolved individual and collective past. It discusses the different narrative models and strategies used in these works and the ways in which they engage with their political and historical context, particularly in the light of campaigns for the so-called recovery of historical memory in Spain (the ';memory boom') and in the broader context of memory and trauma studies. The novels that are examined in this book are Dulce Chacon's La voz dormida (2002), Rosa Regs's Luna lunera (1999), Josefina Aldecoa's La fuerza del destino (1997), Carme Riera's La mitad del alma (2005), and Almudena Grandes's El corazon helado (2007). These works all highlight the multiple nature of memories and histories and demonstrate the complex ways in which the past impacts on the present. This book also considers the extent to which the memories represented in these five novels are inflected by gender and informed by the gender politics of twentieth-century and contemporary Spain.

This collection of essays by scholars of the law and literature movement explores the place of the passions in English law of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together these essays provide insight into the foundations of modern juridical thought.

Bringing together work by distinguished and younger scholars, Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered takes seriously the connections between poetry and novels in the period between Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House and Amelia Opie's Romanic-era novels.

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth centurya uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouchedand it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop's verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prosestructurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop's prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop's thinking about prose to approachfor the first timeher work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole.Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse asamong othersGerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texturein both Bishop's prose proper and her prosaic verseextends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop's workher literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

Between 1850 and 1920 women's travel and travel writing underwent an explosion. It was an exciting period in the history of travel, a golden age. While transportation had improved, mass tourism had not yet robbed journeys of their aura of adventure. Although British women were at the forefront of this movement, a number of intrepid Spanish women also participated in this new era of travel and travel writing. They transcended general societal limitations imposed on Spanish women at a time when the refrain ';la mujer en casa, y con la pata quebrada' described most of their female compatriots, who suffered from legal constraints, lack of education, a husband's dictates, or little or no money of their own. Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 18501920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun analyzes the travels and the travel writings of eleven extraordinary women: Emilia Pardo Bazn, Carmen de Burgos (pseud. Colombine), Rosario de Acua, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Serrano (Baronesa de Wilson), Eva Canel, Cecilia Bhl de Faber (pseud. Fernn Caballero), Princesses Paz and Eulalia de Borbon, Sofa Casanova, and Mother Mara de Jess Guell. These Spanish women travelers climbed mountain peaks in their native country, traveled by horseback in the Amazon, observed the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, suffered from el soroche [altitude sickness] in the Andes, admired the midnight sun in Norway, traveled to mission fields in sub-Saharan Africa, and reported on wars in Europe and North Africa, to mention only a few of their accomplishments. The goal of this study is to acquaint English-speaking readers with the narratives of these remarkable women whose works are not available in translation. Besides analyzing their travel narratives and the role of travel in their lives, Spanish Women Travelers includes many long excerpts translated into English for the first time.

Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics explores new horizons in environmental studies, drawing on both the new field of ecosemiotics and pre-modern traditional cultures. It considers communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life, essential to deep sustainability and the new relevance of the humanities in environmental studies.

This book proposes a new direction for the study of Spanish literature of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, arguing that novels of this period merit a fresh critical approach that enriches existing perspectives on the Spanish novel during the first two decades of the Franco dictatorship. Essays take an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how contemporary cultural theory relating to memory and trauma can enhance our understanding of the postwar Spanish novel.

Beyond Civilization and Barbarism examines how various cultural forms promoted competing political projects in Argentina during the decades following independence from Spain. This turbulent period has long been characterized as a struggle between two irreconcilable forces: the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852) versus a dissident intellectual elite. Most famously, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento described the conflict in his canonical Facundo (1845) as a clash between civilization and barbarism, which has become a catchphrase for the experience of modernity throughout Latin America. Against the grain of this durable script, Beyond Civilization and Barbarism examines an extensive corpus to demonstrate how adversaries of the period used similar rhetorical strategies, appealed to the same basic political ideals of republican government, and were preoccupied with defining and interpellating the pueblo, or people. In other words, their collective struggle was fundamentally modern and waged on a mutually intelligible discursive terrain.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, the first collection of essays on the work of this major British writer, is the indispensable volume for everyone who wants an introduction to Barbauld and to the most current thinking about her. The book will be essential reading for academic students of English literature, 1740 to 1840, and will also attract non-specialists who care about the history of writing by women.

Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin have shown that flanerie is anything but an aimless stroll. Walking through London, Paris, and Berlin entailed engagements with the latest modernity. Thought-provoking, exhilarating, and at times terrifying: flanerie adjusted to and documented the mobility of modernity, its aesthetic possibilities and social risks. Antonio Muoz Molina is one of several contemporary authors who have closely coupled the development of their literary characters to urban perambulations. Their biographic growth, cultural and social adaptations, as well as epistemological insights are so dependent on flanerie that his late twentieth and early twenty-first-century texts warrant the designation flaneur literature. Muoz Molina has also contributed to the current decentralization of flaneur literature from Paris to smaller cities, including Spanish cities like Granada, Cordoba, and San Sebastin. Reflecting on Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin in these cities, his characters update and revise the canon of flaneur literature, stretching its discursive boundaries. This study examines not only the mobility of his characters but also draws attention to intercultural aspects of his flaneur literature which lie both in a uniquely Spanish perspective on flanerie as well as in engagements with cultural otherness. Walking through a Moroccan city or through Chinatown in New York, Muoz Molina's characters broaden the Eurocentric horizon of canonical flaneur literature and the modernist one of his Spanish flaneur precursor, Federico Garca Lorca, whose portrait of New York is revisited in Muoz Molina's longest flaneur text. National and literary boundaries blur as intercultural urban spaces transform his characters into transnational subjects. This study traces the author's struggle with this globalization: a residual rural nostalgia straddles uneasily with forays into filmic flanerie, a form of spectatorship that renders the flaneur newly mobile in the mass-mediatized environments of postmodernity. If Muoz Molina is generally regarded as an incisive chronicler of Spain's transition from Francoism to democracy and an attentive memorialist of the Spanish Civil War, this study bases its portrait of a much more globally engaged Muoz Molina in his characters' movements from Spain into the urban centers of Euro-American postmodernity and its northern African periphery.

This book uses a gender perspective to study the female Amerindian characters in Early Modern Spanish Comedias. The chapters in this collection bring different approaches and perspectives that intersection between feminism and cultural studies while they also critically deconstruct the European representation of Amerindian women.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the core concepts of national identity articulated by Iberian writers during the period between 1900 and 1925. It is centered on four pedagogical essays written in these decades previous to the onset of authoritarian dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, works that are absolutely central to understanding the discursive architecture of collective identity in these same places today. They are as follows: Enric Prat de la Ribas La Nacionalitat Catalana (1906), Teixeira de Pascoaes Arte de Ser Portugus (1915),Vicente Riscos Teora do Nacionalismo Galego (1920), and Jose Ortega y Gassets Espaa invertebrada (1921). The study consists of a discussion of some of the more important theoretical issues connected to social articulation of cultural identities, four chapter-long analyses of the textual manifestations of national identity within the major Romance-language communities of the Iberian peninsula, and a conclusion which underscores the key function played by these public intellectuals in establishing the parameters of the ';Imagined Communities' with which they felt primarily identified. On the most basic level, the study of these ';catechistic' visions of national individuality provides a heightened sense of both the differences and commonalities inherent in the cultural traditions of these core nationality groups of the Iberian Peninsula. On another level, the study reminds us of the important pedagogical function of literature (understood here in the broadest possible sense) in the formation and maintenance of nationality identities then, as well as now.

Sade's Sensibilities examines a new and different Sade: one engaged with broader currents of Enlightenment feeling. In this volume, we recapture a historical Sade alongside a contemporary portrait of Sade as the consummate radical of the eighteenth century.

Sade's Sensibilities examines a new and different Sade: one engaged with broader currents of Enlightenment feeling. In this volume, we recapture a historical Sade alongside a contemporary portrait of Sade as the consummate radical of the eighteenth century.

Juan Luis Martnez's Philosophical Poetics is the first English-language monograph on this Chilean visual artist and poet (19421993). It has two principal aims: first, to introduce Martnez's poetry and radical aesthetics to English-speaking audiences, and second, to carefully analyze key aspects of his literary production. The readings undertaken in this book explore Martnez's intricate textual formalisms, the self-effacement that characterizes his poetry, and the tension between his local (Latin American, Chilean) aspect and the cosmopolitanism or transnationalism that insists on the global relevance of his work. Through his artistic engagement with a number of esoteric conceptsfor example, his recuperation of pataphysical ';logic' and Oulipian combinatorics, mathematical reasoning, Eastern thought, and the historical avant-gardesMartnez creates a rigorous quasi-system of citation and erasure that is a philosophical poetics as well as a poetic philosophy. Juan Luis Martnez's Philosophical Poetics thus addresses all major publications by this groundbreaking Chilean artist and poet in order to read his difficult, experimental texts by focusing on the tension he creates between philosophical, political, literary, and scientific discourses.

Garca Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism: The Aesthetics of Anguish examines the variations of surrealism and surrealist theories in the Spanish context, studied through the poetry, drama, and drawings of Federico Garca Lorca (18981936). In contrast to the idealist and subconscious tenets espoused by surrealist leader Andre Breton, which focus on the marvelous, automatic creative processes, and sublimated depictions of reality, Lorca's surrealist impulse follows a trajectory more in line with the theories of French intellectuals such as Georges Bataille (18971962), who was expelled from Breton's authoritative group. Bataille critiques the lofty goals and ideals of Bretonian surrealism in the pages of the cultural and anthropological review Documents (19291930) in terms of a dissident surrealist ethno-poetics. This brand of the surreal underscores the prevalence of the bleak or darker aspects of reality: crisis, primitive sacrifice, the death drive, and the violent representation of existence portrayed through formless base matter such as blood, excrement, and fragmented bodies.The present study demonstrates that Bataille's theoretical and poetic expositions, including those dealing with l'informe (the formless) and the somber emptiness of the void, engage the trauma and anxiety of surrealist expression in Spain, particularly with reference to the anguish, desire, and death that figure so prominently in Spanish texts of the 1920s and 1930s often qualified as ';surrealist.' Drawing extensively on the theoretical, cultural, and poetic texts of the period, Garca Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism offers the first book-length consideration of Bataille's thinking within the Spanish context, examined through the work of Lorca, a singular proponent of what is here referred to as a dissident Spanish surrealism. By reading Lorca's ';surrealist' texts (including Poetaen Nueva York,Viaje a la luna, and El pblico) through the Bataillean lens, this volume both amplifies our understanding of the poetry and drama of one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century and expands our perspective of what surrealism in Spain means.

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.

Bayard Taylor (18251878) was a nineteenth-century American who combined in his writings and career a catalog of accomplishments and creations that made him one of the most celebrated literary men of his time. The range and significance of Taylor's oeuvre explains his growing importance today to scholars working in the fields of American studies, gender and queer theory, and the aesthetics of racial and class identities. In less than 35 years, he wrote seventeen volumes of poetry, four novels, eight critical works and translations of German classics, nineteen travel narratives, innumerable magazine essays, stories, and reviews, and thousands of letters to friends, admirers, hostile reviewers, business acquaintances, and intimate male companions. His extraordinary success on the public lecture circuit made him one of the best-known men of his day. Taylors diplomatic career enhanced his reputation and influence as a travel writer and included service as a writer for the Perry Expedition to Japan, as a charge d'affaires to Russia during the Civil War, and ambassador to Germany in 1878. This analysis of Taylor's life and works helps to explain three important shifts in American culture: the contradictory development of American ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century; the impact of homophobia and homophilia upon American literary production, criticism, and culture; and the inspirational role played by poetry within a religious and economically-driven society. The introduction describes Taylors changing fortunes within literary history and presents a methodological approach to the Genteel tradition that recovers its distinctive aesthetic and social values and explains how Taylor is its most winning and significant representative. Taylor was a key figure in the genealogy of American interactions with the Islamic world, and his travel writing demonstrates how individual advancement in an egalitarian society can be linked with aggressive imperialism abroad. Taylor's novels display a subtle pattern of transgressive sexuality and demonstrate how Taylors manipulation of reputation and genteel aesthetics created a space for individual expression and freedom. Taylor's 1870 novel, Joseph and His Friend, is frequently cited as Americas first gay novel. This books analysis of Taylor's poetry draws the strands of egalitarian racialization and male-male intimacy together with his abiding concern with regional American identities and the mixed influences of religious subcultures.

In this book, a gathering of exceptional thinkers from the sciences and the humanities engage a common theme: In what ways do language, and storytelling in particular, deal with ethics in science, in literature, or in other art forms?