Bucknell University Press – serie

Alasdair Gray is the first American study of this important Scottish novelist's work, and the first comprehensive study of his novels to appear anywhere. It encompasses the full range of Gray's career, from Lanark to Mavis Belfrage.

How do individuals, societies, and nations deal with their difficult pasts? "Getting History Right" examines this question in a comparative context by looking at an authoritarian East Germany and a pluralistic, democratic West Germany. Eschewing a narrow focus on elites, this work draws extensively on societal level discussions of the past in popular culture, such as film, television, radio, and newspapers. It examines how societal level discussions of the past shaped individual perceptions and interpretations of the past; and how individual perceptions and struggles over the meaning of the past shaped societal level discussions. These struggles over meaning and "getting history right" are not only shaped by political power, but are also a source of symbolic power.To understand political life, scholars must embrace not only material political power, but also the symbolic and cultural roots of power. The research presented here makes extensive use of public opinion data, cinema attendance, and television viewer data, as well as other sources, to look at the multiple meanings that East and West Germans assigned to the Holocaust and World War II across time. Rather than culture merely being an extension of political power, this work argues that culture and the boundaries of the cultural matrix shape the use of political power by different social actors. Getting history right is not only a reflection of political power; it is a source of power itself.

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.

Barcelona, the cultural epicenter of Catalunya, is presently experiencing the most dynamic and polemical period in its modern theater history. It is the commanding hub of an energetic theater scene that in recent years has witnessed an exuberant outpouring of new dramatists, a steady crescendo in theater attendance, and a continual increase in the international presence of Catalan directors, playwrights, and companies. The path along which the contemporary Catalan stage has struggled to recover and reconstitute the professional legitimacy and visibility that it lost during the Franco dictatorship has been a complex process. In the Eye of the Storm: Contemporary Theater in Barcelona describes the public and private dramas, crucial moments, and even some of the back stories that have shaped the theatrical life of the city of Barcelona in the aftermath of the dictatorship. It also considers at length several key companies, playwrights, theatrical works, and performances that have contributed in significant ways to the recuperation of the Catalan stage during the democratic period.

The most significant European poet of the second half of the twentieth century, Paul Celan, viewed poetry as "the language of an individual that has become form," an individual that is constructed through the act of observation in the poem. Hillard argues that individuality is the crux of poetry for Celan because the Holocaust effectively eviscerated the individual. He investigates the core figures of individuality in Celan's poetry and prose: semblance, madness, and the wound. Celan's enigmatic poetry of a depopulated textual universe has perplexed critics. This book argues that the poetry's figures have a common source—the discourse of observation from the fields of appearance, perception, and the mind.

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.

This volume is intended as an introduction of contemporary poetry by notable Uruguayan poets to the English-reading world, but also to readers of Spanish unfamiliar with them. Each poet is represented by an ample and varied selection of poems originally published in Spanish, here with English translations on facing pages. The final chapter is devoted to a biographical sketch of each poet and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.A numbers of these poets have had poems translated into other languages and included in national and international anthologies, and have received international recognition for their work, but they are still virtually unknown in English-speaking countries. Although some of Spanish America's most celebrated narrative writers of the past quarter century have garnered public, academic, and critical attention abroad, their poets have not. Part of this is due to a lack of orientation, a need to identify which poets of the hundreds currently writing are noteworthy.The editor of this anthology addresses this literary omission by identifying seventeen Uruguayans deserving of recognition: Jorge Arbeleche, Nancy Bacelo, Washington Benavides, Mario Benedetti, Amanda Berenguer, Luis Bravo, Selva Casal, Rafael Courtoisie, Marosa Di Giorgio, Enrique Fierro, Alfredo Fressia, Saúl Ibargoyen, Circe Maia, Jorge Meretta, Eduardo Milán, Alvaro Miranda, and Salvador Puig.

How do individuals, societies, and nations deal with their difficult pasts? "Getting History Right" examines this question in a comparative context by looking at an authoritarian East Germany and a pluralistic, democratic West Germany. Eschewing a narrow focus on elites, this work draws extensively on societal level discussions of the past in popular culture, such as film, television, radio, and newspapers. It examines how societal level discussions of the past shaped individual perceptions and interpretations of the past; and how individual perceptions and struggles over the meaning of the past shaped societal level discussions. These struggles over meaning and "getting history right" are not only shaped by political power, but are also a source of symbolic power.To understand political life, scholars must embrace not only material political power, but also the symbolic and cultural roots of power. The research presented here makes extensive use of public opinion data, cinema attendance, and television viewer data, as well as other sources, to look at the multiple meanings that East and West Germans assigned to the Holocaust and World War II across time. Rather than culture merely being an extension of political power, this work argues that culture and the boundaries of the cultural matrix shape the use of political power by different social actors. Getting history right is not only a reflection of political power; it is a source of power itself.

Memoir is Rosario Ferré’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. The autobiography tells the story of Ferré’s transformation from the daughter of a privileged family into a celebrated novelist, poet, and essayist concerned with the welfare of Puerto Ricans, and with the difficulties of being a woman in Puerto Rican society. It is a snapshot of twentieth-century Puerto Rico through the lens of a writer profoundly aware of her social position. It is a picture taken from the perspective of a keen observer of the local history of the island, and of the history of the United States. Included are many photographs that connect Ferré’s life with the story of her writing career.

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 Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002), Rosa Regàs’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 corazón 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.

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—a 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 untouched—and 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 prose—structurally, 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 approach—for the first time—her 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 as—among others—Gerard 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 texture—in both Bishop’s prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop’s work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

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.

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 accounts—an under-educated poet alienated from the philological mainstream—but rather a well-informed thinker who, more than any other contemporary writer, embodies the creative linguistic spirit of the eighteenth century.

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, 1850–1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun analyzes the travels and the travel writings of eleven extraordinary women: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos (pseud. Colombine), Rosario de Acuña, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Serrano (Baronesa de Wilson), Eva Canel, Cecilia Böhl de Faber (pseud. Fernán Caballero), Princesses Paz and Eulalia de Borbón, Sofía Casanova, and Mother María de Jesús Güell. 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.

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.

George Oppen's standing in American poetry has never been greater. Yet despite the mass of critical writing since his death in 1984, the essential basis of the verse—the words on the page and their acoustics—has rarely been the subject of discussion. In this book therefore Richard Swigg breaks away from the general trend of Oppen studies studies and offers the reader a direct way into the visual and auditory dimension of the poems. Ranging across the entire span of the work, from the 1930s to the 1970s, he traces for the first time the full extent of Oppen's engagement with the concrete world and his important poetic relationships with Charles Reznikoff, Denise Levertov, Charles Tomlinson and others.

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

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

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

Poison's 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.

Combining queer theory with theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian genealogy, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini theorizes performative melancholia, a condition where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to experience socially expected (‘normal’) gender as something unattainable or lost. This perceived loss causes an ambivalence within the subject that can lead to self-inflicted violence (masochism, suicide) or violence toward others (sadism, murder). Reading a range of Romantic poetry and novels between 1790-1820, but ultimately moving beyond the period to show its contemporary cultural relevance through readings of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and George Sodini’s 2009 murder-suicide case, this study argues that we need to move beyond focusing on bullying, teens, and LGBT students and look at our cultural investment in gender normativity itself. Doing so allows us to recognize that the relationship between non-normative gender performance and violence is not simply a gay problem; it is a human problem that can affect people of any sex, sexuality, age, race, or ethnicity and one that we can trace back to the Romantic period. Bringing late 18th-century novels into conversation with both canonical and lesser-known Romantic poetry, allows us to see that, as people whose performance of gender occasionally exceeds the normal, we too often internalize these norms and punish ourselves or others for our inability to adhere to them. Contrasting paired chapters by male and female authors and including sections on failed romantic coupling, melancholic femininities, melancholic masculinities, failed gender performance and madness, and ending with a section titled After Romanticism, this study works on multiple levels to complicate previous understandings of gender and violence in Romanticism while also offering a model for contemporary issues relating to gender and violence among people who ‘fail’ to perform gender according to social norms.