Search results for ""bucknell university press""

This book brings to light a mythic dimension of seventeen important eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century narratives that revolve around the persecution of one or more important female characters, and offers original readings of novels by Richardson, Fielding, Burney, Radcliffe, Godwin, Austen, Scott, and others. The myth in question, which Raymond Hilliard calls "the myth of persecution and reparation," serves as a major vehicle for the early novel's preoccupation with the "mother," a mythic figure distinct from the historical mother or from the mother as she is represented in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century maternal ideology. Hilliard argues that the myth of persecution and reparation derives from the topos of female sacrifice in the romance tradition, and shows that this topos is central to several kinds of novels—realist, Gothic, Jacobin, feminist, and historical. Hilliard contends that the narrative of persecution and reparation anticipates the twentieth-century maternal myth associated with the work of Melanie Klein and other "relational model" psychoanalytic theorists, and he thus also examines the psychosexual significance of the "mother." Hilliard explores the relation of psychosexual themes to social representations, and delineates a new theory of plot—both tragic and comic plots - in the early novel.

Read more less

Chilean poet Tomás Harris's Cipango—written in the 1980s, first published in 1992, and considered by many to be the author's best work to date—employs the metaphor of a journey. The poems collectively allude to the voyage of Columbus, who believed that he'd reached the Far East ('Cipango,' or Japan), not the Americas. Building on that mistaken historical premise, Cipango comments on the oppressive legacy of colonialism in Latin America—manifested in twentieth-century Chile through the 1973 military coup by Augusto Pinochet and the brutal dictatorship there—and on the violence and degradation of contemporary urban society. The author's vision is of a decadent, apocalyptic world that nonetheless contains the possibility for regeneration. Cipango is characterized by strange and obsessive imagery—strips of mud, will-o'-the-wisps, vacant lots, blue rats—juxtapositions of contemporary and archaic diction and of incongruous settings that range over time and place; the use of an understated irony; and a dark, incantatory voice. The speakers in various poems address personages such as Columbus, Marco Polo, and the Great Khan, and refer to a breadth of sources including Columbus's diaries, Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, Bram Stoker's Nerval's Aurelia, the Holocaust, Billie Holiday, and the film Goldfinger. The book's content and formal elements combine to produce a work of almost epic scope, one with universal appeal.

Read more less

This ambitious book takes education as a paradigm for eighteenth-century thinking, especially "Enlightenment." That egalitarian project required limits on those who could profit. Hundreds of English educational treatises between 1762 and 1800 demonstrate that education emerged as the concern of a modern public then. The book engages on philosophical and historical fronts in an informed, competent, and readable manner. Although not a history of education in the eighteenth century, it reads symptomatic texts from successive periods: from Adam Smith's response to Mandeville, through the legacies of Chesterfield and Sheridan, to the 1790s. This is coupled with addresses to three crucial topics: the problem of the poor, upper-class education, and 'politeness'; the resort to ancient Sparta; and how and why women should be educated in the nation. These topics raise the questions What is education for? What kind of education is desirable? How much education is enough? Whom does education exclude?

Read more less

Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World studies the epic poem Espejo de paciencia by Silvestre de Balboa, written in 1608 in order to commemorate the abduction of bishop Fray Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, which took place near the town of Bayamo in the eastern part of Cuba on April 29, 1604. Marrer-Fente argues that the disappearance of the Espejo de paciencia manuscript during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not prevent the poetic world described in the text from founding a trope of enduring possibilities in Cuban literature. Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World makes a salient contribution to Cuban colonial studies by offering a comparison between Balboa's poem and the works of other contemporary authors from the Canary Islands, Spain, Spanish America, emphasizing the relevance of transatlantic relations in the poetic production of the period.

Read more less

Through its unparalleled exploration of the trials of poetry from the early seventeenth to twentieth centuries, Poetry Proscribed opens a new line of inquiry into the present-day stakes of poetry through in-depth investigation of the mishearing inherent to poetry's relation to philosophy, history, politics, and the law. By considering the literal and figural trials of Théophile de Viau, André Chénier, Charles Baudelaire, André Breton, and Louis Aragon, each of the chapters of this book theorizes the twentieth-century fascination for the trials of poetry as key to the literary politics of French national identity and the unfulfilled promise of the commitment of literature. The impact of this book on the debate over the place of poetry on the cultural and political landscape will be a lasting one.

Read more less

In this original contribution to the history of American poetry in the twentieth century, Bethany Hicok traces the influence of the women's college on the poetic development of three American poets - Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar, and Sylvia Plath at Smith. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hicok demonstrates how the women's colleges provided an important source of cultural and critical authority for American women poets and played a central role in their poetic development in the first half of the twentieth century. Hicok argues Moore, Bishop, and Plath were each part of a supportive but also competitive community of writers and scholars who honed their writing skills in college classes and in literary magazines. Her book offers theoretically and historically grounded new readings of their poetry within the specific cultural and literary context of the women's college in order to sharpen and deepen our understanding of women's poetic production.

Read more less

The process of modernization that occurred in Spanish society in the first decades of the twentieth century resulted in significant changes in all aspects of life, from economic and social structures to the emergence of new cultural modes and values. While these decades brought new opportunities for women and a degree of social and intellectual freedom, female writers and intellectuals in early twentieth-century Spain nevertheless encountered many obstacles in their efforts to transcend gender barriers and participate in the literary and cultural scene of the day. This book focuses on the life-writing produced by four women writers and intellectuals who were active in the Madrid cultural arena during this period: Carmen Baroja (1883-1950), María Martínez Sierra (1874-1974), María Teresa Le&3243;n (1903-1988), and Concha Méndez (1898-1986). The study examines ways in which these writers portray their positioning in relation to dominant cultural models of the time and their engagement with political and social issues in a period of changing gender dynamics and political instability. In broader terms, this book examines the complex relationships between memory, writing, and identity, and thus contributes to the growing field of explorations of the workings of memory in narrative.

Read more less

In Out of Bounds, Dara E. Goldman teases out the intricacies of a territorial conception of nationhood in the context of a global reorganization that ostensibly renders historical boundaries irrelevant. Hispanic Caribbean writers have traditionally pointed toward the supposed purpose equivalence of island and nation and have explained local culture as a direct consequence of that equation. The major social, political, and demographic shifts of the twentieth century increasingly call this equation into question, yet authors continue to assert its existence and its centrality in the evolution of Caribbean identity. Goldman contends that traditional forms of identification have not been eviscerated by globalization; instead, they have persisted and, in some cases, have been intensified by recent geopolitical shifts. Out of Bounds underscores the ongoing role of the nation as the site of identity formation.

Read more less

Embodying Resistance traces narrative strategies in Griselda Gambaro's novels to the grotesco criollo and to the broader grotesque tradition. Gambaro (Argentina, 1928 - ) is widely recognized as an interpreter of a society in crisis. This first full-length study of all but one of her major narrative publications provides a coherent theoretical framework and clear historical and social referents. After an overview of grotesque and grotesco criollo as literary technique and effect through a summary of pertinent critical theory, these techniques and their effect on the reader are analyzed in six novels, with an emphasis on their critique of social relationships within the Argentine political system and within male-female relationships. This book will be helpful to both the literary scholar and the undergraduate or graduate student and should be read by those interested in contemporary women's writing, oppositional voices under repression, in the political import of art, and in Latin American history and culture.

Read more less

La Florida del Inca is a central text in the history and culture of the Americas. Its author, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador, was born in Cuzco, Peru. In his chronicle Garcilaso offers a unique rendition of Hernando de Soto's expedition (1539-43) to the vast territory known then as La Florida. The studies collected in Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca were presented by leading scholars at an interdisciplinary symposium in November 2003, sponsored by the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), inaugurating the celebration of the fourth centennial of the 1605 publication of this important work. Two additional essays, an Introduction, a Chronology, a General Bibliography, and fifty-five images complete this book.

Read more less

The Woman Saint in the Spanish Golden Age Drama examines the various ways in which male and female dramatists present the figure of the ascetic woman in seventeenth-century Spanish theater. Playwrights depict her not only as the solitary initiate of a rite of passage, struggling to purify herself to approach the divine, but they also focus on the clash between ascetic practice and the desire of family, suitors, and patriarchal society. She may appear as both a forbidden fruit and Christ figure who is ultimately persecuted, scapegoated, and executed by a fearful society. Some writers present her as a representative of the Symbolic Order; invested with sacred powers and ultimate authority, she rebukes transgressors and negotiates the return to God's grace and lawful society. Ritual concepts such as liminality, sacrifice, and communitas mediation guide the interpretation of this complex figure, who marks the site of contention where worldly and ascetic values struggle for control of each play's Counter-Reformation discourse.

Read more less

This study explores the role of historical and fictionalized figures from the New World historiographically in eight novels (both New Historical and traditional historical) published in Mexico and the River Plate during the 1980s and 1990s. It pays particular attention to the fundamental role of fictional autobiographies and testimonials in reqriting historiographical discourses about the discovery and conquest and their relationship to contemporary politics and issues of national and cultural identity in Latin America. The writers and novels include Argentina's Antonio Elio Brailovsky (Esta maldita lujuria) and Abel Posse (El largo atardecer del caminante); Mexico's Eugenio Aguirre (Gonzalo Guerrero), Armando Roa Bastos (Vigilia del Almirante), and Uruguay's Napoleón Baccino Ponce de León (Maluco: la novella de los descubridores). This study shows how these novelists use major and marginal figures to reflect upon the ways that institutional powers have invokes episodes from the discovery and conquest to explain and legitimate the present. They also revisit this period to critique the recent historical past, especially in the case of Uruguay and Argentina, which endured military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read more less

This edition of Johnson's Latin Poems contains a Preface and Introduction followed by text, translation (prose), and brief notes on the poems. Several corrections have been made to the standard text. The notes deal with the obscurities and provide comment on style and treatment. It is often interesting to see how Johnson uses his Latin sources, especially Horace, to add a dimension to his meaning. There are numerous links with familiar episodes in Johnson's life, e.g., his trip to the Hebrides, the revision of his dictionary, his recovery from illness; and there are instances (notable in the anguished appeals for mercy in his prayers), where the more distant Latin form enables Johnson to say things about himself that he would never have expressed in English. The reader will find new details added to the well-loved portrait.

Read more less

This is a literary and philosophical study that links the idea of secularism to the form of the novel. It offers a groundbreaking critical foundation both for understanding the move toward a secular culture and for examining the role of the individual in modern ethical, political, and spiritual contexts.

Read more less

Translation and Culture examines the cultural politics of translation that determine the production and dissemination of ‘‘the foreign’’ in domestic cultures as varied as contemporary North America, Europe, and Israel.

Read more less

The beginning of the seventeenth century in Spain marks a rapid rise in the commercial market for cultural production. This book examines the evolution of this commercial market as reflected in the maturation of two genres: the public theater and the novel. Through a comparative analysis of the playwright Lope de Vega and the novelists Mateo Alemán and Miguel de Cervantes, the author explores the new poetic principles, both implicitly and explicitly, that accompany the rise of this commercialized literature. The book argues that the logic of classical economic theory becomes internalized within the poetic structure of these two genres. Within this logic, the idea of 'taste' comes to play a new and unprecedented role as the arbiter of 'literary' value. Exposed increasingly to the pressures of popular 'taste,' these writers are forced to rework or abandon many of the traditional poetic ideas of the Renaissance in a process that tends to undermine the writer's control over his own work.

Read more less

In this book Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite eloquently describes how principles and policies of the Franco regime, particularly in the early postwar years (1940-1950s), manipulated the behavior of an entire generation of Spaniards.

Read more less

Ana Rossetti is a unique phenomenon in Spanish culture, a performer and writer who resists categorization within any single genre, gender, period, or medium. She began as a performer, and she has returned repeatedly to artistic performance, playfully inverting and perverting norms, continually and radically transforming her public image, and mixing high and low culture. Rossetti's work employs unstable signifiers derived from fashion, literature, design, pornography, psychology, theater, drag, and Catholicism to destabilize critical, analytic, political, social, and gender categories. She has dabbled in most genres, including fiction, essay, drama, children's literature, and opera, and she has collaborated with visual artists, popular singers, and fashion designers. Rossetti's cultural practice in itself presents critics with a key hermeneutic problem: how to define her and her work without reverting back to the categories that her artistic practice destabilizes. This book avoids those temptations by presenting a kaleidoscope of critical readings of Rossetti's texts by leading U.S. scholars, each of whom focuses on a single text, or textual practice, in the case of her lesser known and studied texts.

Read more less

An in-depth study to date of García Lorca's "dark period," this volume moves away from biographical criticism to relate the darkness to the duende's presence. It examines how Lorca meshes biblical apocalyptic discourse with his distinctively pantheistic imagery to represent a battle that is at once social, political, and mythical.

Read more less

As one explores Frost's ethical thinking through his body of prose and poetry, one discovers a conflicted and often confusing world. Some apparently overt claims are shaded in context by tones of cynicism or skepticism. Values he apparently lauded in his work he violated freely in his life. Ideals he longed for are often crushed under a bitter sense of reality. Consequently, the important questions to ask about Frost's ethiscs are whether any systematic patterns emerge, what influenced such patterns, and, most importantly, how they are manifested in the poetry. To examine such issues, the critical methodology of this study is contextual, with emphasis upon three primary contexts. The first context is the nature of the work itself - the fundamental influences upon Frost's art and the way he shapes the poetic work to engage an ethical issue. The second significant context entering this discussion is historical/biographical. While it is not the aim to read Frost's poems directly in the context of life events, as a poet who is often narrative in style, his own life inevitably colors the story of the work. Furthermore, the understanding of ethical situation and response is significantly enhanced by an understanding of the personal and historical details behind the work. Finally, the third and most important context comes directly from the philosophy of ethics itself, demonstrating that consistent ethics, even though intrinsically encapsulated in ambiguity and ambivalence, does in fact appear in Frost's work.

Read more less

Through close textual analyses of the work of Mercè Rodoreda, Remedios Varo, oig, and Carme Riera, this study isolates that which defines a distinctly female narrative voice in Catalan art and literature. From the success of Catalan surrealism, through the destructive years of the Spanish Civil War and to the new beginnings of post-Franco liberation, these writers and artists represent the struggles of women throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Read more less

This volume of essays commemorates and celebrates the creative works of Frederico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel, three contemporaries and friends. The essays suggest that the artistic creations of Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel feature theoretical ideas on (their) contemporary art in general, as well as on the particular art form cultivated by each_ideas that help us to better understand their work as it relates to a wide range of aesthetic theories.

Read more less

Presenting Gender engages with one of the most intriguing aspects of Early Modern and Enlightenment culture: gender passing, the phenomenon of passing oneself off as a member of the opposite biological sex. This collection of ten historically informed and theoretically sophisticated essays by European and American scholars employs "passing" as a pivotal practical, ideological, and textual term for investigating the relations among gender, sex, subjectivity, politics, and economics in a wide range of texts and social and cultural practices during the period 1600-1800. The relations between sex and gender, and biology and culture are found to be imbricated but not indissociable. Together, the contributors demonstrate that the identification of passing with sexual motivations suggested that the sexual body was perceived to be stable, though capable of being categorized into more than two sexes, while the association of passing with political motivations tended to privilege the body's cultural construction. At the same time, the contributors find a reverse set of polarities to be true for gender. Those who passed in early-modern and eighteenth-century culture for sexual reasons suggested that gender was unstable, while those who passed for political reasons suggested its stability. Rich in detail and methodologically rigorous, Presenting Gender makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the shift from Renaissance and Restoration to Enlightenment understandings of identity generally, and sexual identity specifically, and will complicate the hitherto rather rigid periodization of the years 1600-1800.

Read more less

Land of spirituality, or land of widow burning? Land of fabulous wealth, or land of dire poverty, the caste system, and untouchability? Western literature has reflected stereotypical and contradictory images of India since antiquity. For centuries, French writers have reproduced images of India such as the widow immolating herself according to the custom of sati, the pariah or untouchable, and the bayadère or temple dancer, in various forms of theatrical representations - tragedies, ballets, operas, and exhibits in world's fairs. The examination of such recurrent images of India in four French plays and one ballet written from the eighteenth through the twentieth century demonstrates how these dramatic representations intervene politically in French society as well as further the aesthetic agendas of the dramatists themselves. India becomes a spectacle, both literally and figuratively, on the French stage. Raising questions of Orientalism, the book argues that it was precisely because the French lost their Indian colonies to the British in the eighteenth century that India became part of the French literary imagination.

Read more less

This study makes the case that the novel’s intricate self-consciousness begins as a very recognizable story: the Künstlerroman. In such a reading, Ulysses emerges as the story of the time-obsessed Stephen Dedalus, who desires to compose a masterful chronicle that will one day rival the timeless narratives of Ovid and Homer. McBride’s analysis treats at length Stephen’s poetic theories and compositions, examining them as clear forerunners to the novel that the reader is reading. The culminating point is the claim that the figures of Leopold and Molly Bloom may be elaborate fictions created by Stephen.

Read more less

The challenging poetry of José Lezama Lima has not received the critical attention it deserves. This study rectifies the critical imbalance, foregrounding the poetry in a discussion of three issues that link together disparate areas of LezamaOs literary production: cultural assimilation, generation, and resurrection.

Read more less

Bathsua Reginald Makin is an important figure in women's history. A child prodigy, she was thoroughly educated in classical and modern languages at a time when most women were illiterate. She was a middle-class Englishwoman who published her own poetry, established her own school, and wrote in defense of women's right to learning. Not only did she publish but she was also "a woman of great acquaintance" who sometimes acted on her own to earn a living. She enjoyed friendships with prominent Protestant families like those of Sir Simonds D'Ewes and the Raleghs; with the leaders the English Comenian movement, like John Milton's friend Samuel Hartlib or her own brother-in-law, John Pell; and with other learned women like Anna Maria Van Schurman and Lucy, Countess of Huntingdon. She lived in poverty, yet taught a countess and a princess. Historians of linguistics, education, and literature discuss her life and works. Unfortunately, the most basic facts of her life were not known until the 1960s: scholars thought she had grown up as an orphan, whereas she was the daughter of a loving schoolmaster; they thought she had written a pamphlet about debtor's prison that is, in fact, someone else's work; they did not realize that she had published her first book, an extraordinary collection of poetry in many languages, when she was sixteen years old. This biography gathers what is known about Makin, offers new materials from archival research, and interprets the events of Makin's life within the context of women's history in seventeenth-century England. The facts about Bathsua Makin offer a glimpse both into the life of one extraordinary woman and into the problems that learned women faced in this period. Knowing about her life also helps to explain both what the works that she published mean and how she managed to achieve her reputation as England's most learned woman.

Read more less

This book deals with the development of business attitudes toward competition within various industries between the end of World War I and the early New Deal years. Both the voluntary and involuntary efforts by members of the business community to bring unrestrained competition under the control of business institutions are identified.

Read more less

The Ladies of Llangollen is the first book length critical study of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, whose 1778 elopement and five decades of “retirement” turned them into eighteenth century celebrities and pivotal figures in the historiography of female same-sex desire. Debates within the history of sexuality have long foundered over questions of what constitutes “proof” of past sexual desires and practices, and the nature of Butler and Ponsonby’s intimacy has been deemed inimical to productive critical consideration. In this ground-breaking study Fiona Brideoake attends to the archive of their shared life—written, performed, and enacted in the vernacular of the everyday—to argue that they embodied an early iteration of female celebrity in which their queerness registered less as the mark of some specified non-normativity than as the effect of their very public, very visible resistance to sexual legibility. Throughout their lives and afterlives, Butler and Ponsonby have been figured as chaste romantic friends, prototypical lesbians, Bluestockings, Romantic domestic archetypes, and proleptically feminist modernists. The Ladies of Langollen demonstrates that this heterogeneous legacy discloses the queerness of their performatively instantiated identities.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Across the academy, disciplines flock for scientific status, keen to demonstrate that their approach to their subject matter is "scientific." How might literary criticism achieve anything like this sort of methodological consonance? Looking at the history of twentieth-century attempts, from Northrop Frye's macrostructural systematizing and Roman Jakobson's microstructural analysis, through to the collapse of the structuralist project and the recent strategic embrace of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, this book looks at what hopes remain for a "science" of literary criticism and draws on the work of such thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Kurt Vonnegut to investigate the consequences of adopting a scientific perspective toward literary study. With an increasing number of departments teaching "literature and science" courses, the question of what literary study stands to gain (and what it might risk) from cleaving to the sciences is especially pressing.

Read more less

This book explores Antonio Muñoz Molina's creation of compelling narratives about Spain's immediate past by engaging in a dynamic dialogue with popular culture subgenres and the media. The author asserts that popular culture functions in Muñoz Molina's novels as provider of a series of strategies that represent in the text aspects of Francoism and the Transition that, because of their relevance, are part of the structure of feeling of those periods. The study focuses on the role of popular music, film, photography, the thriller, the romance novel as well as the radio and other gadgets of modern technology in Muñoz Molina's Novels. The Gaze on the Past argues that through the incorporation of popular culture in texts, Muñoz Molina undertakes a deliberate and intense reflection on memory and on the creation of historical moments, highlighting their desire to be heard.

Read more less

The focus of Fictive Domains is the period 1717-1770, during which nostalgia was just beginning to emerge as a cultural concept. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist theories, this book examines representations of bodies and landscapes in the cultural production of the early- to mid-eighteenth century. With considerable social anxiety surrounding changes in the structure of the family, the control of bodies within the family, and ownership and access to the land, nostalgia generated narratives that became the richly textured novels and long poems of the eighteenth century. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), social anxieties are played out on the body of Clarissa Harlowe; female passion is controlled in Alexander Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise (1761); questions of domesticity and family are explored in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1760); and an alternative domestic structure is proposed in Sarah Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall (1762).

Read more less

Engendering Legitimacy is a study of the intersecting of law, land, property, and gender in the prose fiction of Mary Davys, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Jonathan Swift. The law of property in early modern England established relations for men and women that artificially constructed, altered, and ended their connections with the material world, and the land they lived upon. The cultural role of land and law in a changing economy embracing new forms of property became a founding preoccupation around which grew the imaginative prose fiction that would develop into the English novel. Susan Glover contends that questions of political and legal legitimacy raised by the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 were transposed to the domestic and literary spheres of the early 1700s. Well researched and compellingly argued, Engendering Legitimacy examines the ways by which experimentation in prose fiction begins to re-vision the period's enmeshing of law, land, property, and political power, as the four writers imagine new grounds for authorial and political legitimacy.

Read more less

This volume explores a wide range of Victorian texts, including novels, poems, sermons, and some less easily categorized writings, in terms of their use of language and imagery suggestive of the Apocalypse. The focus is less upon the conscious or deliberate use of the Apocalypse as a source of sublime metaphors or as a guide to cultural decline than on the ways in which certain tropes recur in the writings of the period. These can be characterized in terms of oppositions that both structure apocalyptic literature and characterize much Victorian writing: human/inhuman, desert/city, veiled/revealed, time/the eternal, this world/other world. The book sets out to show that what might be called a cultural affinity exists between the writing of the Victorian era and apocalyptic literature, and to argue that such a relationship was unavoidable for a society steeped in the bible as it confronted dramatic changes in its relationships with nature, God, and time.

Read more less

This book shows how, in his enormously influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke embraces the new rhetoric of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, adopting the strategies of his scientific contemporaries to create a highly original natural history of the human mind. With the help of Locke's notebooks, letters, and journals, Peter Walmsley reconstructs Locke's scientific career, including his early work with the chemist Robert Boyle and the physician Thomas Sydenham. He demonstrates too how the Essay embodies in its form and language many of the preoccupations of the science of its day, from the emerging discourses of experimentation and empirical taxonomy to developments in embryology and the history of trades. Widely research and lucidly and engagingly written, Locke's Essay and the Rhetoric of Science constitutes an important new reading of Locke, on that shows both his brilliance as a writer and his originality in turning to science to effect a radical re-invention of the study of the mind.

Read more less

Emotion as Meaning offers a new model of the mind based upon a new understanding of emotion. It resolves the debate between the imagists and the propositionalists by tracing the translation of language into vicarious experience, showing that the mind represents the imagined world by means of not only image and idea, but emotion.

Read more less

During her lifetime, Gloria Fuertes achieved the status of a controversial cultural icon, both through her poetry for adults and through her poetry, recorded readings, and television programs for juveniles. This collection of lively essays, by authors who specialize in contemporary Spanish poetry, approaches the works of Gloria Fuertes from various theoretical and critical perspectives. In Her Words speaks to the inherent complexity of Gloria Fuertes' poetry, as manifested in its ultimate indeterminacy and indecision, yet attests to this poet's abiding value as the voice of the marginalized-women, the poor, children, all the invisible members of society-who were silenced during the years of Spanish dictatorship under Franco. This book manifests the prescience of Fuertes' stands on a variety of social and cultural issues, from women's changing roles in society, gender and sexuality, identity within a society held captive by a dictatorial regime, to more universal themes such as love, justice, ethics, nature, and obsolete societal norms. In Her Words decisively addresses and ultimately rejects the Spanish cultural elite's inclination to disavow Fuertes' influence and reveals how her voice has shaped succeeding generations of Spanish poets and underscored the ubiquity of her verse in contemporary Spanish literature and culture. The subtlety and diversity of the essays included in this volume attest to the power of Gloria Fuertes' poetic creativity, her ability to appeal to a wide audience both in Spain and abroad, and her place in the contemporary Spanish poetic canon.

Read more less

Born in the small Extremaduran town of Moraleja in 1946, Spanish poet Pureza Canelo, at the age of twenty-five, published her first collections of poetry, Celda verde and Lugar común (winner of the 1970 Adonais Prize). By 1979, she had settled upon an understanding of her own aesthetic evolution, which she elaborated in Habitable (Primera poética). Then, in 1986, after a period of disenchantment with the written word during which she published only two chapbooks-Espacio de emoción (1981) and Vega de la paloma (1984)-she redefined her position in Tendido verso (Segunda poética). Designed to complement Nature's Colloquy with the Word: Pureza Canelo's First Poetics (Bucknell, 2004), the current text deciphers the intricate poetic language of the poet's mature works, which, at the time of writing, included the two above-mentioned chapbooks as well as Tendido verso, Pasión inédita (1990), and No escribir (1999). The author traces recurrent aesthetic and philosophical positions that serve to differentiate the poet's first and second poetics. Tendido verso is the volume in which temporality supersedes essence and, in so doing, breaks with insights expressed by Juan Ramón Jiménez during his Modernist phase. In Pasión inédita the intimate pronominal discourse between poet and creative other allows them to coalesce into an indeterminate being. At this point the desired goal of the creative process is achieved; the "holy wedding" (hieros gamos) of poet and creative other occurs. No escribir abandons the struggle of Canelo's previous books and carries out the method prescribed by her second poetics. She recognizes that only the creative process can satisfy her desire, and that love, the dominant symbol for creation, indeed, allows the pain of poetic failure to cease. Passion, nonetheless, must stop short of fulfillment, since the written poem, laden with the poet's gaze and subjectivity, cannot exist apart from its shadow.

Read more less

This book remedies decades of critical neglect that has deprived the fields of art and literary criticism of one of the most important autobiographical and surrealist works of the twentieth century. It reveals the origins of the text, its relation to and role within Dalí's corpus, as well as its reception, provocative power, and lasting popular success. The study examines the literary contexts and sources of the text as well as its structural and narrative devices, and reveals its complex parodic mechanics that caricaturize the Freudian self. In addition, the book illuminates the pictorial elements of Dalí's narrative and the major components of his fictional self-portrait. Finally, an interpretation within the Freudian and Surrealist contexts of the fascinating and intricate drawings and photo montages of The Secret Life illustrates the uniqueness of an autobiography designed to be read as much as to be contemplated.

Read more less

Monstrous Society argues that in the eighteenth-century moral economy, power was divided between official authority and the counter-power of plebeians. This tacit, mutual understanding comes under attack when influential political thinkers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and T.R. Malthus attempted to discipline the social body and make state power immune from popular response. But once negated, counter-power persisted, even if in the demands of a debased, inhuman body. This response wis writ large in Gothic tales, especially Matthew Lewis's The Monk and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the innovative, embodied political practices of the mass movements for Reform and the Charter. By interpreting the formation of modern English culture through the early modern practice of reciprocity, David Collings constructs a "nonmodern" mode of analysis, one that sees modernity not as a break from the past but as the result of attempts to transform traditions that, however distorted, nevertheless remain broadly in force.

Read more less

This first English-language monograph on the Northern Irish-born writer Bernard MacLaverty discusses his fiction in its aesthetic, cultural, and political contexts. Richard Rankin Russell emphasizes MacLaverty's dialectic of imprisonment versus freedom, the latter of which is represented by love. Love in the earlier works is often perverted, whether in the name of family or Irish nationalism, but after the publication of the novel Cal (1983), manifestations of love become more positive and characters attain the potential to escape various forms of imprisonment. Russell identifies three distinct phases of MacLaverty's career: the visual, the sonic, and a blending of the two. He concludes by showing how MacLaverty's style, humor, and values enable his deeply humane fiction to model human community. Attentive to language and theoretically well informed, each chapter of this enterprising book discusses a particular short story collection or novel and also explores the salient features of MacLaverty's fiction in general.

Read more less

In Home Is Where the (He)art Is Sharon Magnarelli employs a variety of contemporary critical approaches to examine ten dramatic works written or performed between 1956 and 1999. Focusing on plays by Griselda Gambaro, Eduardo Rovner, Sabina Berman, Diana Raznovich, Roberto Cossa, Hugo Argüelles, Marcela del Río, and Luisa Josefina Hernández, Magnarelli demonstrates how the playwrights engage with family relationships to comment on sociopolitical issues of national and international significance while simultaneously challenging dramatic conventions and theatrical representation. This insightful study provides fresh readings of plays that have already attracted significant critical attention. It also serves as a useful introduction to the modern theater of Mexico and Argentina for the interested non-specialist.

Read more less

This book expands traditional conceptions of the Enlightenment by examining the roles of wonder and Jesuit missionary conceptions of the Enlightenment by examining the century in a production of knowledge that serves both intellectual and religious functions. Ewalt analyzes a variety of classical and sacred rhetorical techniques for vivid persuasion that illuminate the simultaneously spiritual and scientific discourse employed by Joseph Gumilla in El Orinoco ilustrado (1741, 45), a text that concretizes an eclectic, Catholic Enlightenment that unites sentiment and reason, allows for emotion within scientific inquiry, and employs the strategy of wonder to accumulate, enumerate, and disseminate knowledge. Ewalt's work complements and extends studies proposing new and more inclusive Enlightenment models that challenge secular prejudices and reconsiders the assumption of European centrality by taking into account the Americas and other peripheral areas where modernity was redefined rather.

Read more less

By the end of the nineteenth century, a mode of painting that captured 'instantaneity' had come to be seen as an appropriate and characteristically Impressionist means of depicting its subject, when that subject was understood to be our variable perception in nature. In May of 1895, however, Monet turned capriciously it seemed to some, to the immutable façade of a Gothic cathedral. Struck by the curious choice of a medieval monument as subject matter, critics, used to talking about 'instantaneity,' continued to lay emphasis on the theme of temporality, and this was addressed in two distinct but related ways. First, there was the matter of perception - the temporality that is involved in engaging visually with the near impenetrable surfaces of individual canvases, suggesting the dense complexity - the nuances - of our 'momentary' perception. Then, there was the temporality involved in the real historical character of the motif itself; an awareness of the persistence of memory embedded in the medieval edifice and its significations of history and nation. It is the critical discourse and its complex negotiations - aesthetic, philosophical, and literary - that this book examines.

Read more less

Staging Words, Performing Worlds presents new perspectives on Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela and their theater by theorizing how, through performance, nation can be "re-imagined" and reconstructed. Each chapter frames the sociopolitical and theatrical national context and presents a theoretical analysis of the dramatic and ideological functions of intertexts in plays by Victor Hugo, Rascón Banda, Maruxa Vilalta, César Rengifo, Néstor Caballero, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Rafael Spregelburd, among others. Bulman demonstrates how past artistic texts - other plays, stories, newspaper articles, songs, or paintings - can be reworked and "translated" to create a new theatrical spirit. The multiple levels of translation - intertext to text, text to script, script to performance - have implications for the ways texts are interpreted and for how they in turn "perform" their nation. Well researched, theoretically sophisticated, and highly readable, Staging Words, Performing Worlds explores the problematic notion of nation today. It will be of interest to scholars, dramatists, playwrights, critics of Latin American theater, and to those working in world-theater and cultural studies.

Read more less

This fascinating and diverse collection of essays concerns the lives and representations of homosexuals in the long eighteenth century. The collection addresses and seeks to move beyond the current critical division between essentialists and social constructionists, a division that bedevils the history of sexuality and fissures Queer Theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as theoretical approaches, the essays explore canonical and non-canonical literature, scurrilous pamphlets and court cases, music, religion and politics, consumer culture and sexual subcultures. Eighteenth-century life is depicted here in all its rich variety, from the scandals surrounding Queen Anne to the struggles of laboring-class poets, and from the famous - Defoe, Handel, Boswell, Burney, and the Duchess of Devonshire - to the obscure male frequenters of Mother Clap's Molly House or the anonymous female participants in the extraordinary story of The She-Wedding.

Read more less

Littoral of the Letter is the first full-fledged study in English of the world of the late Argentine author Juan José Saer (1937-2005), who was highly regarded as Argentina's best living novelist, a continuator of Burgess's literary legacy. Characterized by an uncommon coherence and rigor, Juan José Saer's writing defies simple categories. In both his fictional and essayistic writing Saer defamiliarizes the reader by questioning some of the most cherished certainties, especially those having to do with the role ascribed to Latin American literature, the uses of prose and poetry in the present, and the relation between language and the mass media. By questioning the assimilation of prose theory and the novel theory dictated by pragmatic needs of the state and the market, Saer produces a change in the function of narrative language that allows him to start where more traditional forms of realism end: the unsayable. The purpose of this book is to make explicit Saer's procedures, the main coordinates of his poetics and to reflect on the situation of literature in an age dominated by images and the 'total' cultural phenomenon.

Read more less