Books published by Bucknell University Press

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?

Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village's inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay.

Sensibility, or the capacity to feel, played a vital role in philosophical reflection about the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts in eighteenth-century France. Yet scholars have privileged the Marquis de Sade's vindication of physiological sensibility as the logical conclusion of Enlightenment over Germaine de Stal's exploration of moral sensibility's potential for reform and renewal that paved the way for Romanticism. This volume of essays showcases Stal's contribution to the ';affective revolution' in Europe, investigating the personal and political circumstances that informed her theory of the passions and the social and aesthetic innovations to which it gave rise. Contributors move seamlessly between her political, philosophical, and fictional works, attentive to the relationship between emotion and cognition and aware of the coherence of her thought on an individual, national, and international scale. They first examine the significance Stal attributed to pity, happiness, melancholy, and enthusiasm in The Influence of the Passions as she witnessed revolutionary strife and envisioned the new republic. They then explore her development of a cosmopolitan aesthetic, in such works as On Literature, Corinne, or Italy, On Germany, and The Spirit of Translation, that transcended traditional generic, national, and linguistic boundaries. Finally, they turn to her contributions to the visual and musical arts as she deftly negotiated the transition from a Neoclassical to a Romantic aesthetic. Stal's Philosophy of the Passions concludes that, rather than founding a republic based on the rights of man, Stal's reflection fostered international communities of women (artists, models, and collectors; authors, performers, and spectators), enabling them to participate in the re-articulation of sociocultural values in the wake of the French Revolution.Contributors: Tili Boon Cuille, Catherine Dubeau, Nanette Le Coat, Christine Dunn Henderson, Karen de Bruin, M. Ione Crummy, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Lauren Fortner Ravalico, C. C. Wharram, Kari Lokke, Susan Tenenbaum, Mary D. Sheriff, Heather Belnap Jensen, Fabienne Moore, Julia Effertz

Toni Morrison's wooded and verdant clearing, a central trope in her novel Beloved, is the model for this book. The collection is a distinctive review, examination, and (re)discovery of Morrison's work and cultural impacts as defined by emerging and acclaimed artists, scholars, and public figures.

Interiors and Narrative shows how crucial interiors are for our understanding of the nature of narrative. A growing cultural fascination with interior dwelling so prevalent in the late nineteenth century parallels an intensification of the rhetorical function interior architecture plays in the development of fiction. The existential dimension of dwelling becomes so intimately tied to the novelistic project that fiction surfaces as a way of inhabiting the world. This study illustrates this through a comparative reading of three realist masterpieces of the Luso-Hispanic nineteenth century: Machado de Assis's Quincas Borba (1891), Ea de Queiros's The Maias (1888), and Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta (18841885). The first full-length study to juxtapose the renowned writers, Interiors and Narrative analyzes the authors' spatial poetics while offering new readings of their work. The book explores the important links between interiors and narrative by explaining how rooms, furnishings, and homes function as metaphors for the writing of the narrative, reflecting on the complex relation between private dwellings and human interiority, and arguing that the interior design of rooms becomes a language that gives furnishings and decorative objects a narrative life of their own. The story of homes and furnishings in these narratives creates a semiotic language that both readers and characters rely on in order to make sense of fiction and reality.

How do we understand academic freedom today? Does it still have relevance in a globalreconfiguring of higher education in the interests of the economy, rather than the publicgood? And locally, is academic freedom no more than an inconvenient ideal, paid lip serviceto South Africa's Constitution as an individual right, but neglected in institutional practice?This book argues that the core content of academic freedomthe principle of supporting andextending open intellectual enquiryis essential to realizing the full public value of highereducation. John Higgins emphasizes the central role that the humanities, and the particular forms ofargument and analysis they embody, bring to this task.Each chapter embodies the particular force of a critical literacy in action, one which bringsinto play the combined force of historical inquiry, theoretical analysis, and precise attentionto the textual dynamics of all statement so as to challenge and confront the received ideas ofthe day. These provocative analyses are complemented by probing interviews with three keyfigures from the Critical Humanities: Terry Eagleton, who discusses the deforming effects ofmanagerialism in British universities; Edward W. Said, who argues for increased recognition ofthe democratizing force of the humanities; and Jakes Gerwel, who presents some of the mostrecent challenges for the realization of a humanist politics in South Africa.

In Print Technology in Scotland and America Louis Kirk McAuley investigates the mediation of popular-political culture in Scotland and America, from the transatlantic religious revivals known as the Great Awakening to the U.S. presidential election of 1800. By focusing on Scotland and Americaand, in particular, the tension between unity and fragmentation that characterizes eighteenth-century Scottish and American literature and culturePrint Technology aims to increase our understanding of how tensions within these corresponding political and cultural arenas altered the meaning of print as an instrument of empire and nation building. McAuley reveals how seemingly disparate events, including journalism and literary forgery, were instrumental and innovative deployments of print not as a liberation technology (as Habermas's analysis of prints structural transformation of the public sphere suggests), but as a mediator of political tensions.

The Complicity of Friends offers an entirely original perspective within which to appreciate four eminent Victorians: Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson. For the first time, I clarify the nature of Spencer's illness and demonstrate its repercussions in the lives and work of his three gifted friends.

This study examines how debates about history during the French Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various meanings of the term ';history' itself, were multiple and far reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s Burke, Price, Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others debate the historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge, but historical representationlargely the legacy of the 1790s' novelremains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre. Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other, often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing into a stable, non-partisan, aestheticized feature of the form as practised by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 17901814 demonstrates that the transformation of the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).

Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals discusses the English periodical and how it shapes and expresses early conceptions of authorship in the eighteenth century. Unique to the British eighteenth century, the periodical is of great value to scholars of English cultural studies because it offers a venue where authors hash out, often in extremely dramatic terms, what they think it should take to be a writer, what their relationship with their new mass-media audience ought to be, and what qualifications should act as gatekeepers to the profession. Exploring these questions in The Female Spectator, The Drury-Lane Journal,The Midwife, The World, The Covent-Garden Journal, and other periodicals of the early and mid-eighteenth century, Manushag Powell examines several ';paper wars' waged between authors. At the height of their popularity, essay periodicals allowed professional writers to fashion and make saleable a new kind of narrative and performative literary personality, the eidolon, and arguably birthed a new cult of authorial personality. In Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals, Powell argues that the coupling of persona and genre imposes a lifespan on the periodical text; the periodicals don't only rise and fall, but are born, and in good time, they die.

In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of ';A Nocturnal Reverie,' provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature, centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.

Reading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French writing, and ideas. Examining key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, the volume presents a wide-ranging account of the year's work in literature and the key issues that preoccupied writers at this time.

Revealing Bodies turns to the eighteenth century to ask a question with continuing relevance: what kinds of knowledge condition our understanding of our own bodies? Focusing on the tension between particularity and generality that inheres in intellectual discourse about the body, Revealing Bodies explores the disconnection between the body understood as a general form available to knowledge and the body experienced as particularly ones own. Erin Goss locates this division in contemporary bodily exhibits, such as Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds, and in eighteenth-century anatomical discourse. Her readings of the corporeal aesthetics of Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry, William Blakes cosmological depiction of the bodys origin in such works as The [First] Book of Urizen, and Mary Tighes reflection on the relation between love and the soul in Psyche; or, The Legend of Love demonstrate that the idea of the body that grounds knowledge in an understanding of anatomy emerges not as fact but as fiction. Ultimately, Revealing Bodies describes how thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and bodily exhibitions in the twentieth and twenty-first call upon allegorized figurations of the body to conceal the absence of any other available means to understand that which is uniquely our own: our existence as bodies in the world.

Rococo Fiction in France reconfigures the history of the ';long eighteenth century' by revealing the rococo as a literary phenomenon that characterized a range of experimental texts from the end of the French Renaissance to the eve of the French Revolution. Tracing the literary rococo's evolution from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, and exploring its radicalization during the 1670s, 80s, and 90s, Allison Stedman unearths the seventeenth century rococo's counter-vision for the trajectory of the French monarchy and the dawn of the French Enlightenment. The first part of the study investigates the relationship between Montaigne's philosophy of literary production and those of early seventeenth century ';table-talk' novelists, libertine writers, and playwrights involved in the quarrel over Corneille's play Le Cid. She thus establishes the existence of a rococo philosophy of literary production whose goal was to innovate, to bring pleasure, and to create communities. The second part of the study explores the impact that the Duchess de Montpensier's literary portrait galleries, Jean Donneau de Vise's periodical the Mercure Galant, and other forms of rococo literary production by such authors as Charles Sorel, Alcide de Saint-Maurice, J.N. de Parvial and Jean de Prechac had in the creation of a textually mediated social sphere that served as the foundation of the publicly critical culture of the French Enlightenment. The study concludes with an investigation of the influx of salon sociability into the textually mediated social sphere during the 1690s. Stedman examines the role of interpolated literary fairy tales, proverb plays and other rococo publication strategies in such late seventeenth-century women writers as d'Aulnoy, Lheritier, Murat, and Durand in transfiguring the salon from an exclusive social circle mediated by physical presence to an inclusive social diaspora mediated by texts. Rococo Fiction in France challenges established views of early modern French literary history and discusses a range of little known works in a generous and engaging manner.

Throughout history, Barcelona and Madrid have competed in practically every aspect of social life, politics, and culture. By delving deep into the myriad of cultural and political complexities that surround these two cities-from the onset of Futurism to the arrival of Surrealism in Spain-a complex social and cultural network is revealed.

Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness explores the novel's participation in eighteenth-century ';inquiries after happiness,' an ancient ethical project that acquired new urgency with the rise of subjective models of wellbeing in early modern and Enlightenment Europe. Combining archival research on treatises on happiness with illuminating readings of Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin and Mary Hays, Brian Michael Norton's innovative study asks us to see the novel itself as a key instrument of Enlightenment ethics. His central argument is that the novel form provided a uniquely valuable tool for thinking about the nature and challenges of modern happiness: whereas treatises sought to theorize the conditions that made happiness possible in general, eighteenth-century fiction excelled at interrogating the problem on the level of the particular, in the details of a single individual's psychology and unique circumstances. Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness demonstrates further that through their fine-tuned attention to subjectivity and social context these writers called into question some cherished and time-honored assumptions about the good life: happiness is in one's power; virtue is the exclusive path to happiness; only vice can make us miserable. This elegant and richly interdisciplinary book offers a new understanding of the cultural work the eighteenth-century novel performed as well as an original interpretation of the Enlightenment's ethical legacy.

Excitable Imaginations offers a new approach to the history of pornography. Looking beyond a counter-canon of bawdy literature, Kathleen Lubey identifies a vigilant attentiveness to sex across a wide spectrum of literary and philosophical texts in eighteenth-century Britain. Esteemed public modes of writing such as nationalist poetry, moral fiction, and empirical philosophy, as well as scandalous and obscene writing, persistently narrate erotic experiencesdesire, voyeurism, seduction, orgasm. The recurring turn to sexuality in literature and philosophy, she argues, allowed authors to recommend with great urgency how the risque delights of reading might excite the imagination to ever greater degrees of educability on moral and aesthetic matters. Moralists such as Samuel Richardson and Adam Smith, like their licentious counterparts Rochester, Haywood, and Cleland, purposefully evoke salacious fantasy so that their audiences will recognize reading as an intellectual act that is premised on visceral pleasure. Eroticism in texts like Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, in Lubey's reading, did not compete with instructive literary aims, but rather was essential to the construction of the self-governing Enlightenment subject.

By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying Loss studies not only how loss is signified, but also the ethico-political significance of such signifying. First, by examining the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning, it elaborates a poetics of narrative mourning in which prosopopoeia becomes the master trope of mourning while catachresis the master trope of melancholia and chiasmus of trauma. Second, it develops a situated and flexible theory of mourning, capable of adjusting to diverse contexts in which the ethical and political stakes of mourning are different-in short, Signifying Loss calls for the formulation of geopolitical and differential tactics of mourning and mournability rather that for a clear cut strategy of inconsolability.

This book collects for the first time the complete correspondence of the eighteenth-century British author Charlotte Lennox.

This work contains a selection of James Arbuckle's poems and essays presented in a first modern scholarly edition with a biographical introduction. The work, which includes original poems, translations of Horace, satires on Swift, essays on politics, politeness and the early Scottish Enlightenment, offers new insights into early eighteenth-century British and Irish culture.

Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong studies often-overlooked contemporary poetry. Through the exploration of poetry and a select number of short stories, this book contemplates the meanings of home, belonging, and the homeland in post-conflict, globalizing, and neoliberal El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Aparicio analyzes literary representations of and meditations on the current conditions as well as the recent pasts of Central American homelands. Additionally, the book highlights aesthetic renditions of home at the same time that it engages with and is grounded in contemporary Central American cultures, politics, and societies. In effect, this book contests hegemonic and apparently commonsense views that assert that globalization produces global citizenship and globalized experiences. Instead it argues that a palpable desire for home and belonging survives and thrives in rapidly globalizing Central American homelands.

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid ';lady travelers' who ventured into the geography of the New WorldMexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbeanat a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (180682), Maria Graham (17851842), Flora Tristan (180344), Fredrika Bremer (180165), and Adela Breton (18491923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women's travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women's social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women's travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.

This study explores how Spanish American modernista writers incorporated journalistic formalities and industry models through the cronica genre to advance their literary preoccupations. Through a variety of modernista writers, including Jose Mart, Amado Nervo, Manuel Gutierrez Njera and Ruben Daro, Reynolds argues that extra-textual elements such as temporality, the material formats of the newspaper and book, and editorial influence animate the modernista movement's literary ambitions and aesthetic ideology. Thus, instead of being stripped of an esteemed place in the literary sphere due to participation in the market-based newspaper industry, journalism actually brought modernismo closer to the writers' desired artistic autonomy. Reynolds uncovers an original philosophical and sociological dimension of the literary forms that govern modernista studies, situating literary journalism of the movement within historical, economic and temporal contexts. Furthermore, he demonstrates that journalism of the movement was eventually consecrated in book form, revealing modernista intentionality for their mass-produced, seemingly utilitarian journalistic articles. The Spanish American Cronica Modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture thereby enables a better understanding of how the material textuality of the cronica impacts its interpretation and readership.

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust's oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust's pastiches, in fact, ';do things with words' to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses.Building on the ';speech-act' theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous ';Goncourt' pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust's work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in ';heritage' films such as Regis Wargnier's Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer's Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

This book addresses the place of women writers in anthologies and other literary collections in eighteenth-century England. It explores and contextualizes the ways in which two different kinds of printed materialΓÇöpoetic miscellanies and biographical collectionsΓÇöcomplemented one another in defining expectations about the woman writer. Far more than the single-authored text, it was the collection in one form or another that invested poems and their authors with authority. By attending to this fascinating cultural context, Chantel Lavoie explores how women poets were placed posthumously in the world of eighteenth-century English letters. Investigating the lives and works of four well-known poetsΓÇöKatherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Elizabeth RoweΓÇöLavoie illuminates the ways in which celebrated women were collected alongside their poetry, the effect of collocation on individual reputations, and the intersection between bibliography and biography as female poets themselves became curiosities. In so doing, Collecting Women contributes to the understanding of the intersection of cultural history, canon formation, and literary collecting in eighteenth-century England.

This volume analyzes Portuguese texts from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, reading them as symptoms of a haywire paternal function. Authors studied include Eça de Queiros, Almeida Garrett, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Jose Regio, Jose Cardoso Pires, Helder Macedo, and Gomes de Amorim. Historical figures interrogated include Dom Sebastiao, Prince Henry the Navigator, and the dictators Sidonio Pais and Salazar.

In looking closely at Horace Walpole's Correspondence, George E. Haggerty shows how these letters, when taken in aggregate, offer an astonishingly vivid account of the vagaries of eighteenth-century masculinity. Walpole talks about himself obsessively: his wants, his needs, his desires; hies physical and mental pain; his artistic appreciation and his critical responses. It is impossible to read these letters and not come away with a vivid impression of a complex personality from another age. Haggerty examines the ways in which Walpole presents himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman, and considers his personal relationships, his needs and aspirations, his emotionalism and his rationality - in short, his construction of himself - in order to see what it tells us about the age in general and more specifically, about masculinity in an era of social flux. This study of Walpole and his epistolary relations offers a unique window into both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in western culture. Recent studies have tried to rewrite Walpole in a twenty-first century mold while this work looks at the writer and the ways in which he constructs himself and his relations, not in hopes of uncovering a lurid secret, but rather in pursuit of the figure that he created and that has fascinated generations of readers and writers since the eighteenth century.

This book traces the development of John Eliot's mission to the Algonquian-speaking people of Massachusetts Bay, from his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1690. It explores John Eliot's determination to use the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, both in speech and in print, as a language of conversion and Christianity. The book analyzes the spoken words of religious conversion and the written transcription of those narratives; it also considers the Algonquian language texts and English language texts which Eliot published to support the mission. Central to this study is an insistence that John Eliot consciously situated his mission within a tapestry of contesting transatlantic and political forces, and that this framework had a direct impact on the ways in which Native American penitents shaped and contested their Christian identities. To that end, the study begins by examining John Eliot's transatlantic network of correspondents and missionary-supporters in England, it then considers the impact of conversion narratives in spoken and written forms, and ends by evaluating the impact of literacy on praying Indian communities. The study maps the coalescence of different communities that shaped, or were shaped by, Eliot's seventeenth-century mission.

This monograph offers a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between the poetics and practice of Robert Burns and reevaluates the nature of his role in the history of Scots. By drawing on ideas from twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory, it seeks to transform the debate surrounding Burns's language. Through a series of readings that explore the way in which Burns used and commented on the styles associated with different places, groups and genres, it demonstrates how languages, places, and the identities associated with both are, in Burns's writing, subject to continual reinvention. In this respect, the study breaks with existing accounts of the subject, insofar as it presents Scots, English and the other languages used by Burns not as fixed, empirically-observable entities, but as ideas that were revised and remade through the poet's work. Focusing on Burns's poems, songs, letters, prefaces, and glossaries, the book pays special attention to the complex ways in which the author engaged with such issues as phonology, grammar, and the naming of languages. The Burns who emerges from this book is not the marginal figure of traditional accountsan under-educated poet alienated from the philological mainstreambut rather a well-informed thinker who, more than any other contemporary writer, embodies the creative linguistic spirit of the eighteenth century.

Impossible Mourning argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has figured largely in public discourse in South Africa over the last ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the multiple losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This profound fact is at the center of this book which explores the significance of the disavowal of AIDS-death in relation to violence, death, and mourning under apartheid. Impossible Mourning shows how in spite of the magnitude of the epidemic and as a result of the stigma and discrimination that has largely characterized both national and personal responses to the epidemic, spaces for the expression of collective mourning have been few. This book engages with multiple forms of visual representation that work variously to compound, undo, and complicate the politics of loss. Drawing on work Thomas did in art and narrative support groups while working with people living with HIV/AIDS in Khayelitsha, a township outside of the city of Cape Town this book also includes analyses of the work of South African visual artists and photographers Jane Alexander, Gille de Vlieg, Jillian Edelstein, Pieter Hugo, Ezrom Legae, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Paul Stopforth, and Diane Victor.