Books published by Bucknell University Press

In Counterfeit Politics, David Kelman reassesses the political significance of conspiracy theory. Traditionally, political theory has sought to banish the ';paranoid style' from the ';proper' domain of politics. But if conspiracy theory lies outside the sphere of legitimate politics, why do these narratives continue to haunt political life? Counterfeit Politics accounts for the seemingly ineradicable nature of conspiracy theory by arguing that all political statements ultimately take the form of conspiracy theory.Through careful readings of works by Ernest Hemingway, Ricardo Piglia, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ishmael Reed, Jorge Volpi, Rigoberta Mench, and ngel Rama, Kelman demonstrates that conspiracy narratives bear witness to an illegitimate or ';counterfeit' secret that cannot be fully recognized, understood, and controlled. Even though the secret is not authorized to speak, this ';silence' is nevertheless precisely what gives the secret its force. Kelman goes on to suggest that all political statementseven those that do not seem ';paranoid'are constitutively illegitimate or counterfeit, since they always narrate this unresolved play of legitimacy between an official or authorized plot and an unofficial or unauthorized plot (a ';complot'). In short, Counterfeit Politics argues that politics only takes place as ';conspiracy theory.'

New Lenses for Lorca examines the presence of scientific motifs in Federico Garcia Lorca's writing and drawing.

Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedy. Plays by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Congreve, Trotter, Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pixas well as much modern scholarship about themtaint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become ';women' by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it. Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it interacts with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging interests in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

Lives are known textually, and this collection of new essays explores, corrects, and advances contemporary knowledge of historical lives and texts, particularly of the British eighteenth century. Complementing the essays is a complete translation and critical edition of a life of Hester Thrale Piozzi written in French by Frances Burney.

Mary Delany's phrase ';the matrimonial trap' illuminates the apprehension with which genteel women of the eighteenth century viewed marriage. These women were generally required to marry in order to secure their futures, yet hindered from freely choosing a husband. They faced marriage anxiously because they lacked the power either to avoid it or to define it for themselves. For some women, the written word became a means by which to exercise the power that they otherwise lacked. Through their writing, they made the inevitable acceptable while registering their dissatisfaction with their circumstances. Rhetoric, exercised both in public and in private, allowed these women to define their identities as individuals and as wives, to lay out and test the boundaries of more egalitarian spousal relationships, and to criticize the traditional marriage system as their culture had defined it.

A Mother's Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France chronicles the emegence of an idealized mother figure whose reforming zeal sought to make French society more just. Lesley H. Walker contends that this attempt during the eighteenth century to 'rewrite' social relations in terms of greater social equality represents an important but overlooked strand of Enlightenment thought. During this period, popular domestic novels, the ever-raging debates about women's social roles, and highly sought-after genre paintings produced a remarkable image of motherhood. Through a focus on feminine virtue, Walker studies female writers and artists to argue that these women theorize the domestic sphere as a site of significant social and ethical productivity.

In this book on the relationship between pcaro and cortesano, Felipe E. Ruan argues that these two cultural figures are linked by a shared form of deportment centered on prudent self-accommodation. This behavior is generated and governed by a courtly ethos or habitus that emerges as the result of the growth and influence of the court in Madrid. Ruan posits that both pcaro and cortesano, and their respective books, conduct manual and picaresque narrative, tacitly engage questions of identity and individualism by highlighting the valued resources or forms of capital that come to fashion and sustain self-identity. He places the books of the pcaro and cortesano within the larger polemic of early modern identity and individualism, and offers an account of the individual as agent whose actions are grounded on objective social relations, without those actions being simply the result of mechanistic adherence to the social order.

Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France analyzes the work of several literary critics in France and England, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, who were inspired by the idea that literature especially the literary sublime might offer us the deepest kind of knowledge. Dominique Bouhours, Nicolas Boileau, Rene Rapin, John Dennis, and the abbe Dubos believed that literature could deliver truths that transcend our world and were analogous or even equal to the truths of divine revelation. Ann Delehanty argues that this shift towards the transcendental realm pushed the definition of the literary work away from describing its objective properties and towards its effects on the mind of the reader. After placing these ideas about literature in the context of the religious and philosophical thinking of Blaise Pascal, Delehanty traces the evolution of a debate about literature in the writings of the critics in question. They embraced theories of sentiment and the passions as the epistemological means of identifying and knowing the transcendental aspects of a literary work that eventually came to be known as aesthetics. By tracing the historical evolution of the relationship between transcendentalism and aesthetics in French and English neoclassical thought, Literary Knowing in Neoclassical France provides new and engaging insights into an important moment in our literary history.

Yves Bonnefoy's book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet's thoughts and a landscape reflect each other.

Through the study of more than twenty novels produced in Spain from the 1840s to the 1920s, this book explores the literary means by which the social options available to modern Spanish bourgeois citizens were discursively constructed, occasionally before and often concomitantly to their production in reality. As a result, this study is concerned with the interplay of realism and reality in modern Spain. From the earliest folletines of the 1840s to the Modernist novels of the 1920s, the majority of novels written in this eighty-year period are what one might term novelas de costumbres contemporneas, or novels of contemporary customs, and therefore primarily concerned with faithfully copying and moreover influencing real social norms in the public sphere.In these pages, I argue that the spatial and behavioral discourses in the novels of contemporary customs offer a telling history of the evolving formulation of the Spanish bourgeoisie. The linking of novels and urbanism is hardly arbitrary in the context of nineteenth-century Spain. Urbanism, particularly in the nineteenth century, was as much a verbal construction as the novel, as proven by the lengthy treatises of such prominent Spanish bureaucrats, engineers, architects, and urban planners as Ramon de Mesonero Romanos, Ildefons Cerd and Carlos Mara de Castro. For Spanish intellectuals of this era, city planning and the novel functioned as parallel, enmeshed discourses in which to work out what it meant to be middle class and the roles this class ought to play in contemporary society. In this way, they can be considered associated fields of discourse, in the sense described by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucaults treatise was a call for scholars to reexamine historical fields and question the historical grouping of knowledge(s) into certain discursive unities, and consider whether these might be broken up and new ones conceived.In this vein, this book undertakes a broader and more integrative view of the Spanish nineteenth century, calling into question the boundaries of fields such as etiquette and urban planning, or literature and touristic discourse.

Poisons Dark Works in Renaissance England considers the ways sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fears of poisoning prompt new models for understanding the world even as the fictive qualities of poisoning frustrate attempts at certainty. Whether English writers invoke literal poisons, as they do in so many revenge dramas, homicide cases, and medical documents, or whether poisoning appears more metaphorically, as it does in a host of theological, legal, philosophical, popular, and literary works, this particular, ';invisible' weapon easily comes to embody the darkest elements of a more general English appetite for imagining the hidden correlations between the seen and the unseen. This book is an inherently interdisciplinary project. This book works from the premise that accounts of poisons and their operations in Renaissance texts are neither incidental nor purely sensational; rather, they do moral, political, and religious work which can best be assessed when we consider poisoning as part of the texture of Renaissance culture. Placing little known or less-studied texts (medical reports, legal accounts, or anonymous pamphlets) alongside those most familiar to scholars and the larger public (such as poetry by Edmund Spenser and plays by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) allows us to appreciate the almost gravitational pull exerted by the notion of poison in the Renaissance. Considering a variety of texts, written for disparate audiences, and with diverse purposes, makes apparent the ways this crime functions as both a local problem to be solved and as an apt metaphor for the complications of epistemology.

What if the goddess Athena, who sprang fully-grown from Zeus's head and denied she had a mother, became aware of the compelling existence of her other parent? What if she discovered that her mother, Metis,-first wife of Zeus and 'wiser than all gods and mortal men,' according to Hesiod-was swallowed by her father and continued to impart her wisdom to him from inside his belly? Recent Spanish novels by women parallel this hypothetical situation based on Greek myth by featuring female protagonists who obsessively re-examine the lives of their mothers, seeking to know and understand them. In Mother & Myth in Spanish Novels, Schumm examines six narratives by Spanish authors published since 2000 that focus on a daughter's search to know more about her matriarchal heritage: Carme Riera's La mitad del alma, Luc'a Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio, Rosa Montero's El coraz-n del tOrtaro, Cristina Cerezales's De oca a oca, Mar'a de la Pau Janer's Las mujeres que hay en m', and Soledad Puertolas's Historia de un abrigo. In each of these novels, the protagonist realizes that failure to integrate the loss of her mother into her life results in the inability to define herself. Without valorization of the maternal subject, the legacy of the daughter is at risk-she is also objectified and swallowed- and the whole society suffers. The daughters' attention to their mothers in these novels is as if Athena had finally recognized that her mother, Metis, had been ingested by Zeus. The myth of Metis and Athena becomes a metaphor of the daughter's quest toward wholeness and individuation in these works; she begins to understand that her maternal legacy is a source of wisdom that has been obscured. These novels by Spanish women strengthen the mother's voice, rescue her from anonymity, and rewrite the matriarchal archetype.

Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices.

Blighted Beginnings: Coming of Age in Independent Ireland offers a much needed examination of the manner in which narratives of emerging selfhood were used persistently by authors in order to critique and reform problems that have plagued post-independence Ireland.

Gothic Terrors brings together two discursive fields that have had very little contact hitherto: gothic studies and Hispanism. Though widely accepted in English studies, Hispanists seldom invoke the concept of a Gothic mode existing beyond its first appearance in the eighteenth century. Highlighting Gothic elements in mainstream Spanish fiction from the nineteenth century until the present day, Lee Six challenges the view that Spanish writers rejected what the Gothic had to offer. Through close study of texts by Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Miguel de Unamuno, Camilo José Cela, Adelaida García Morales, Espido Freire, and Javier García Sanchez, Abigail Lee Six traces the evolution of three staples of the Gothic: the heroine imprisoned on grounds of madness, the doubled or split character, and the use of violent, gory description. Persuasively argued and well researched, Gothic Terrors reflects on the Gothic presence in Spanish mainstream literature and identifies two important ways in which it crosses cultural divides: the traditional gulf between high and low culture within Spain, and the engagement of Spanish creative writers with transnational literary trends. Gothic Terrors will thus appeal to Gothic scholars who are interested in the Spanish dimension of their field, as well as to Hispanists who may have been unaware of how relevant and useful Gothic studies could be for them.

The Scottish and French Enlightenments are arguably the two intellectual movements of the eighteenth century that were the most influential in shaping the modern age. This challenging selection of essays comparing Scottish and French enlightenment views of natural history, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, history, and art history, complicates and enriches the notion of "Enlightenment" and will inaugurate a new field of Franco-Scottish studies.

Imagining Modernity in the Andes is an interdisciplinary work that deals with the intersection of projects of modernity with constructions of race and ethnicity in the Andes. This book focuses initially on Indigenismo, attempting to recuperate the intellectual energy of writers and artists from the twenties who rewrote political and cultural discourse in an irreversible manner, and concludes with a consideration of the new configurations of indigeneity that are emerging today not only in the Andes but across the globe. The multidisciplinary work of Jos Mara Arguedas occupies a privileged place in this study and his anthropological work is analyzed in the context of an ideological climate. In addition to considering sociological and anthropological accounts, Archibald examines representations of urbanization and social informality by four Peruvian novelists, pointing to the prevalence of the troupe of the grotesque as a metaphor for the unmanageability associated with cities of the South. Finally, Imagining Modernity in the Andes analyzes the implications of the emergence of new visual media in a culture context long defined by the oral-textual divide, and considers the continued relevance of the concept of transculturation in a transnational and post-literary context.

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.

The process of shaping and asserting cultural identity in viceregal Spanish America occurred as much through the medium of pictures as through the medium of writing. Focused on writing that references visual texts (ekphrasis), Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing examines the way words about pictures in the writing of three Spanish American CreolesHernando Domnguez Camargo, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruznegotiate the challenges that confronted the American-born ruling elite in Spanish America during the contentious transitional period between the Conquest and Independence.In Spanish America, pictures have long served as a crucial medium for cultural communication. In vast rural and urban regions where print culture is not deeply rooted and being ';cultured' is not synonymous with being ';literate,' visual texts ranging from pre-Hispanic pictographic codices to Baroque architectural surfaces to postmodern painted murals have played an essential role in shaping and asserting cultural identity. During the viceregal era, texts that referenced such visual texts proliferated in Latin America, particularly among Creole elites, who found themselves trapped in an ambiguous political and social position between Spain and America. At the level of content, Creole ekphrases bear little obvious connection to categories of social privilege. On the level of form, however, these ekphrases engage conventions of representation that reveal the social contingencies of the poetic gaze. They refract the visual object through an ideologically-charged language that invokes differentials of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and position within the colonial power structure. Visions of Empire brings recent scholarship on visuality and ekphrasis to bear on twenty first-century reexaminations of criollismo to explore how cultural productions of the Spanish American Creole elite exercised relations of power, mediated social differences, and presented symbolic organizations of social space. Focusing on the way Creole adaptations of Gongoran ekphrases placed the Creoles in a position of epistemological, economic, or moral authority over peninsular Spaniards and Amerindian and casta majorities around them, this book illustrates how Creole words about pictures propose alternate visions of empire, symbolically reordering Spain's empire in the Americas around the figure of the Creole.

As part of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary commemoration, the University of Georgia Press published the first full scholarly edition of Sir John Hawkins's Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787). From its inception, Hawkins's work, arising from a close relationship with Johnson that spanned over forty-five years, challenged certain adulatory views of Johnson and has continued to raise interesting critical questions about both Johnsonian biography and the genre of biography generally. Reconsidering Biography collects new essays that explore Hawkins's biography of Johnson within its historical, political, legal, and personal contexts. More particularly, this volume considers how Hawkins's approach to recording the Life of Johnson opens up broader questions about early modern biography and its relationship with eighteenth-century trends in aesthetics, politics, and historiography. These sophisticated and informed essays on a curious and often vexed friendship, and its literary offspring, supply a colorful and expansive view of the role of life-writing in the eighteenth-century literary imagination.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) spent five years in Germany (1800-1805) and became deeply informed about its Romantic literature and philosophy, then at its height in that country. In the course of his enthusiastic embrace of the German language and culture, Robinson built up an intellectual and literary capital that he would draw on for the rest of his long life. The main thrust of this critical and biographical study is to demonstrate that Robinson is an important nineteenth-century life writer, and that his autobiographical writings, a large portion of which are still in manuscript, deserve to be taken seriously by students and scholars of autobiography, and to be published in a new edition. Since to date no one has focused on Robinson the life writer, this study of Robinson's German years draws on his published letters, diaries, and reminiscences as well as some manuscript material.

This book is about Susan Howe's poetry from the perspective of space. Howe reshapes cultural configurations of space through her drive to infiltrate interstitial areas of "third" spaces: the silences of history, the margins of the page, the placeless migrants, and the uncharted lands. Nuances, frontiers, thresholds, edges, fuzzinesses, ambiguities, pauses, singularities, margins: these are the spaces where her poetry occurs, places that lie between two states. Rather than absences, therefore, the space of this poetry is a place of being, of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as becoming. Third space is contested because it must also call itself into question in reimagining itself; in questioning its condition and rethinking itself, it contradicts itself repeatedly, setting up the form of an ever-present yet ever-shifting paradox of self-presencing. This site is also, however, the place of no frames or boundaries, a place that is all margins and singularities, that site of displacement, where migration is eternal and violence is perennial. Nomadism becomes an emblem in Howe's poetry for the twentieth-century condition as it represents the continual movement through space of the body, that never-ending, always-perpetuated sense of loss of place, but that equally charged coming into being regardless of the space within which that loss/becoming occurs.

This is the first full-length book on the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. It explores the recurring themes that have influenced and organized their ongoing engagement with sound and light.

This is the first book-length study of female adolescence in the French novel of this period. It analyzes representations of the 'world apart' of female adolescence in selected novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, several factors contributed to the shaping of a new social category for young women, which then gained increasing attention from writers. Art and life echoed one another, as novels about female adolescents created a social stir, and incited further discussion about the proper role for young women in French society.

Winner of the 2010 Serra d'Or Prize for Research in Catalan Studies

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as 'other' both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland, the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature.

This is the first book in the English language devoted to an analysis of the work ofthe Mozambican author Mia Couto. The book provides essential background details about Mozambican political and cultural history.