Search results for ""bucknell university press""

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

In The Erotics of War in German Romanticism, Patricia Anne Simpson explores the ways early nineteenth-century German philosophers, poets, and artists represent war and erotic desire. The author argues that gender is connected to a larger debate about the construction of the self in relation to a community at a time that this definition is under revision. She analyzes the culture of war as it shapes the bonds of fraternal, familial, and eventually national identity. Simpson defines the "erotics" of war as discursive attempts to assert the priority of ethical identity and citizenship over individualized desire. The seemingly ancillary problem of female desire emerges not as a marginal issue, but as the focal point of a debate about identity. Casting a wide evidentiary net, this study draws examples from literature, the visual and decorative arts, journalism, and military journals to demonstrate the centrality of war to national discourse in the early nineteenth century.

Read more less

Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores, through the experiences of individuals and groups ranging from James Boswell and his circle at one end of the social spectrum to highland folk musicians at the other, the reasons why Scottish men, women, and children made the long journey south to London and their reactions to the great metropolis once there. Through the varied approaches of historians and art historians, and literary critics and musicologists, this book addresses a series of interconnected themes including the dynamics that gave rise to periodic "Scotophobia" and also generated a distinct form of Scottish social capital and eventual integration; patronage, as a type of social relationship particular to the age and to the capital city; cultural production, both high and popular; and the making of Scottish identity in London, along with the impact of London-forged Anglo-Scottish identity on Scotland and evolving notions of "Britishness." Contributing to this volume are Iain Gordon Brown, Sandro Jung, Viccy Coltman, James J. Caudle, Nigel Aston, Patricia R. Andrew, Anita Guerrini, Mary Anne Alburger, Stana Nenadic, Katharine Glover, and Jane Rendall.

Read more less

Among the many ancient techniques that shift or become problematized during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, this volume focuses on one in particular, that of ekphrasis. It is through the lens of experimentation with the technique of ekphrasis that we can view Cervantes' texts. Don Quixote can be studied through the constant contamination and agon between the visual and the verbal arts. This collection, then, seeks to foreground Cervantes' contributions to the tradition of ekphrasis, and utilizes this rhetorical device as synecdoche for Cervantes' innovations and transformations of art and thought during a period that has been called the Spanish Golden Age. The book renames this period as the Age of Cervantes and also seeks to show how not only Cervantes, but also his predecessors, contemporaries, and continuators viewed the relationship between the arts and particularly, the use of ekphrasis.

Read more less

Neuter summarizes H#&233;lène Cixous's early concerns - self, language, meaning, relations, #&233;criture feminine - by laying bare metaphors, incorporating existing material, and developing text by association, fragmentation, and play on signifiers. Its "substance" is nebulous; its woven structure determines the presence and function of all its elements and expresses Cixous's guiding philosophy. Neuter's goal is to transform the narratives, myths, and discourses that mold our selves, provoking a revelation through new juxtapositions of the self with all others or new relations. The title reflects both Cixous's focus on language and her attempt to free us from sexual preconceptions. Neuter was first published by Grasset in 1972 as the third part of a trilogy which includes Le troisi#&232;me corps and Les commencements, published in 1970.

Read more less

Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was a key figure in the foundation of contemporary Latin American fiction. By taking a critical position vis-á-vis the restitutionary current in Latin American studies (e.g., to focus on the myths of the noble savage, lost paradises, black legends, and good revolutionaries), James Pancrazio provides a highly innovative re-reading of Carpentier's work. Borrowing theories of psychoanalysis, gender, performance, and Cuban literature and historiography, The Logic of Fetishism argues that the structure of disavowal functions as a creative alternative to the all-encompassing meta-narratives of exile and insularity. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that transgression is written into the Cuban code: border crossings form the matrix of Cuban literature and culture. Pancrazio thus focuses on the oft-neglected transvestite, a figure who marks the entrance to the symbolic order and makes culture possible by representing representation.

Read more less

Giants of the Past explores how ideas about evolution, initially seen as a major threat to the establishment of Victorian England, were rapidly co-opted in popular fiction and transformed from a revolutionary danger to a powerful bolstering mechanism for reactionary ideas, particularly in the areas of gender, sexuality, and race.

Read more less

Many a Scot seemed surprised by the opening of a new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Few seemed clear where it had come from. Was it a British trick or a Scottish triumph? This book decides by investigating the fact that Scotland manages to hold onto an identity apparently out of proportion to its size. Through the twentieth century, Scots often blamed their land's vivid imagery for making the nation seem a place of local color rather than a political space. But looking back from the moment beyond the Scottish Parliament, we can see that Scotland's signs have played a large role in maintaining an idea of Scotland that, by the end of the twentieth century, made a Parliament seem both possible and necessary. The essays gathered here, by leading cultural critics and historians of Scotland, show how, since the late eighteenth century, Scotland has been converted into lively signs capable of rewriting the nation today.

Read more less

Catherine Jone's Literary Memory explores the relationship of memory to writing in the "long" eighteenth century in Scotland and America. It does so by arguing for Walter Scott's adaptation and development in the Waverley Novels of varieties of "literary memory" from the philosophy and psychological theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, philosophy (defined broadly as thinking about knowledge, existence, and being) became inseparable from psychology (the science of the mind). Locating Scott within this rich intellectual context, Jones explores his understanding of, and narrative transformation of, various forms of literary memory, while judiciously distinguishing Scott's complex and influential achievement from later Freudian theories and representations. Casting the cultural and historical perspective wider still, this book also offers a lucid and original account of the ideological rejection of the cultural synthesis represented by Scott's "literary memory" by the New England romance writers, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Theoretically and historically grounded, Literary Memory will appeal to all those interested in the writings of Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment, Romantic cultural history, the history of the novel, narrative theory, and literature in relation to psychology and psychoanalysis.

Read more less

Juan Valera (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century Spain's most respected authors, wrote novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and literary criticism. The unifying thread of his work is "art for art's sake," that is, beauty as the end and purpose of inspiration and creativity. Two examples in long works of this aesthetic credo are his novels Pepita Jiménez (1874) and the novel translated here, Doña Luz (1879); the former is about a seminarian who falls in love with a young widow, and the latter, is about another young woman, one who seeks to escape the stigma of illegitimacy and lead a quiet life. The introduction discusses Valera's aesthetics and oeuvre and analyzes Doña Luz in relation to them, as well as to other nineteenth-century Spanish and European novels; Notes explain cultural, historical, and literary references; the Select Bibliography lists first editions of Valera's novels, modern editions of Doña Luz, English translation of Valera's novels, and secondary sources.

Read more less

Divine Madness provides a theory that enables the concept of irony to be transferred from the literary to the visual and aural domains. Two stories are being told. One is a story of how literary conceptualization has conquered the fields of the other arts and the other is a story of how literary conceptualization, conversely, has been successively relativized. Elleström provides a survey of the historical roots of the concept of irony as well as a discussion of two hermeneutical "options": irony as a mode of oral communication and irony as a mode of literary expression. The author examines how irony is classified and how it is used as an interpretive strategy rather than a "textual trait" intended by an author. Other concepts such as paradox, mysticism and deconstruction are also evaluated in terms of their relation to irony. Elleström concludes by demonstrating that ironic interpretations of not just music are intimately connected to norms, values, and even political stances that tend to be hidden behind an allegedly objective terminology - a terminology that has its roots in the comprehension of irony as an intentional, oral phenomenon.

Read more less

In recent years there has been an extended debate about Enlightenment thought. Though many scholars have concluded that there were several "Enlightenments," some continue to make generalizations about the Englightenment and some speak about "the Enlightment agenda." After discussing the cult of the deathbed scene in eighteenth-century Britain and France, the author looks at three currents of Enlightment thought implicit in the deathbed "projects" of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Paul Marat. Although Hume and Johnson hold profoundly different views of religion, their political thinking has much in common. Their reformist thought differs radically from what might be called the transformist thought of Marat, who hoped the French would become disinterested citizens whose civil religion was patriotism. The author argues that Enlightment thought was more varied and-in its reformist current-less hostile to tradition than many observers have allowed. Enlightment thought was less a cluster of ideas than a debate about a number of questions, especially the following: how to contain religious and secular fanaticism (or what was called enthusiasm); what are the effects of luxury; and what is the nature of the passions. There was, as J.G.A. Pocock says, "a family of Enlightments," and "there is room for the recognition of family quarrels..." Why look at deathbed scenes to chart the currents of Enlightment thought? Because an interest in deathbed scenes was widespread in eighteenth-century Britain and France. The final days of Hume stirred up a controversy that lasted for at least a decade and the final days of Johnson also attracted a great deal of attention, but Marat's death had the greatest impact of the three. His assassination gave impetus to the Jacobins' attempt to eliminate the influence of the church and greatly expand the influence of the state. Marat's project to transform France failed, but so did the projects of Hume and Johnson. Hume argued that religious belief was based on the foolish fear of

Read more less

This collection gathers new essays in ecofeminist literary criticism and theory that extend the critical trajectory of ecocriticism toward interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and internationalism in the context of social ecofeminist theory and practice. The volume focuses on several major issues: multiculturalism and issues of environmental justice, constructions of masculinity and heterosexuality, formation of communities of resistance, and questions of language and representation.

Read more less

Approaching language as the external manifestation of intentionality, Glorious incomprehensible: The Development of Blake's Kabbalistic Language traces the evolution of hebaic etymologies and mystical grammars in the illuminated books. With numerous reproductions of the visual and references to the verbal art, Spector traces the profound shift in Blake's subjective consciousness from the earliest prose tracts through the final prophecies.

Read more less

Until this book, there has not been a collection that focuses exclusively on Pope's satiric masterpiece. The seeming resistance to fully engage the poem belies its centrality within eighteenth-century culture. Like Gulliver's Travels or The Beggar's Opera, the poem's hybridity actually changes and imrpoves upon the forms it parodically controls. But unlike those texts, it proves difficult to teach, despite multiple points of entry. The essays in this volume attempt to teach the poem from a variety of perspectives and, in doing so, to illuminate its role as literary history, cultural artifact, and material object. They suggest the ways the poem interacts with and influences the dynamic milieu from which it springs. George Rousseau once remarked that The Dunciad had yet to be mined as either material or as a material object. His essay in this volume begins to redress that state of affairs by exploring the relationship between Pope's psychosexual development and his antipathy to opera. Approaching this under-studied Popeian aversion from a second perspective, Valerie Rumbold explores the theme of opera within The Dunciad in Four Books to reveal internal tensions and complicated examples of shared authorship in the poem. Her essay illustrates the challenge historical analysis poses to the tradition of reading the poem as an expression of absolutes. Laura J. Rosenthal's and Eric V. Chandler's essays each examine, in different terms, the construction in the 1740s. Similarly, Linda Zionkowski discusses Pope's centrality in the debates over the often-gendered nature of literary labor, and his repudiation in Book IV of The Dunciad of the concepts of masculine conduct from which he was excluded. Catherine Ingrassia looks at the reconstruction of Pope's body and persona (which both suffer from a compromised masculinity) in Edmund Curll's pamphlets responding to the 1728 Dunciad. Thomas Jemielity reads The Dunciad as "mock-apocalypse" and suggest how such a reading complicates the

Read more less

This book is a translation of Salinas’s Seguro azar. It includes fifty poems, most of them one or two pages in length, with the Spanish and English texts on facing pages. There is also a prologue by the poet, and introduction by the translator, and a reminiscence by Salinas’s friend and fellow poet, Willis Barnstone.

Read more less

Clarín has been acclaimed as nineteenth-century Spain's most profound short-fiction writer, and Ten Tales features selections that have been singled out by critics as among his best efforts.

Read more less

This volume of comparative approaches to Early Modern Spanish literatures explores the many unrecognized connections between Golden Age texts and the cultural productions of other places and other eras.

Read more less

Through analyses of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughless, The Female Quixote, Evelina, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre, this genre study explores the ways in which the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British female Bildungsroman fuses female power and autonomy with a conservative reintegration with society. Although the works in question range across a century, their combination of socially conservative plots with feminist critiques of society is remarkable and rare and coincides with similar convergences of particular historical and social forces. The result, the early female Bildungsroman, embraces the Englightenment idealization of "development" as it simultaneously questions the Bildungsroman's underlying concept, individual subjectivity. Feminist critics of the past two decades have contended that the protagonists of early female Bildungsroman actually "grow down" rather than grow up. This study argues instead that these protagonists construct themselves as subjects by manipulating the signs of their objectification. By learning how the male gaze functions in their society, heroines learn to manipulate their appearance and behavior in order to gain some control over the self they project for others. The result is a model of development based on a fragmented view of the self, in which heroines learn to negotiate between their own sense of personal autonomy and society's more limited expectations. This study also briefly suggests that as later heroines, such as Maggie Tulliver and Edna Pontellier, publicly maintain the right to create their own worldview, they lose their ability to compromise and thus to survive within a hostile environment. Therefore, later novels of female development abandon the dialectic of reintegration and subversion that sustained the female Bildungsroman.

Read more less

A fresh approach to the dramatic experience is attempted in this book. It begins with a consideration of Edmund HusserlOs attempt to clarify our understanding of immediate experience and takes into account Martin HeideggerOs and Hans-Georg GadamerOs movements from the phenomenology toward the individualOs complex interactions and involvements in a world.

Read more less

In this book, Martin Wechselblatt explores Samuel Johnson's double professional self-construction as alternately Augustan sage and Grub Street hack: as the exemplary "Dr. Johnson" and as one of the many "authors to let" brought to life and just as suddenly extinguished by mass-market publishing. Unlike previous studies of Johnson and print culture, however, Bad Behavior is concerned with the reasons so many readers and critics of Johnson have been led to regularly subsume into the monumental precedent of Johnson the sage, the material conditions of modern authority expressed by self-reflections of Johnson the hack. Situating Johnson within a historical and sociological model of modernity adapted from critical theory, Dr. Wechselblatt argues that Johnson's double self-construction as at once high-cultural sage and popular hack dramatizes tensions between learned and commercial cultures in the emerging public sphere of contemporary civil society. As Johnson was acutely aware, the great paradox of cultural criticism is that it depends for its authority on the very culture it criticizes. For this reason, it is particularly useful to read Johnson through his critics - to reconfigure, from the directions criticism has taken, criticism's own conditions of possibility. In a version of what Horkheimer and Adorno characterize as modernity's epistemological closure and its ritual transformation of the "unknown" into "the well-known of an equation," Bad Behavior investigates the critical reduction of Johnson's discourse to its maxims, and the relation of this critical practice to the peculiary modern identification felt by fans toward celebrities. Dr. Wechselblatt finds that Johnson authority reproduces the tension between, on one hand, a stable, delegated form of knowledge, which Johnson associated with the patronage system and with Locke's temporal duration; and on the other, the mere succession of authorities characteristic of experience in the marketplace.

Read more less

This book studies the retraction and its uses by Petrarchan poets of the Italian and English Renaissance, delineating the characteristics of the palinode as a genre and exploring its impact upon Renaissance lyric poetry.

Read more less

The OOcritical poemOO explains a poetry that is self-conscious about its inability to say what it means. This concept underlies and informs the work of eight Latin American poets, spanning three generations: Paz, Huerta, Borges, Juarroz, Pizarnik, Girro, Martínez, and Millán.

Read more less

In his second critical study of modern Spanish poetry, Mayhew explores the literary self-consciousness of several major poets — Guillen, Salinas, Aleixandre, Valente, Gil de Biedma, and Guillermo Carnero.

Read more less

Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain examines selected dramatic works where the vicissitudes of matrimony play center stage. Various aspects of conjugal relations including courtship, divorce, and widowhood take on particular relevance in the Spanish comedia in light of the intense debates raging over the "seventh sacrament" in early modern Europe. The institution of matrimony is subject to unprecedented scrutiny during this period and provides a rich source of material for playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Taking the decrees on marriage of the Council of Trent (1563) as a point of departure, Carrión examines the conjugal bond within a literary and historical framework, offering close readings of dramatic works, religious decrees, and moral treatises where the conjugal bond plays a central role. She identifies in works such as Lope's Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, Cervantes' El juez de los divorcios, and Calderón's El medico de su honra the emergence of more modern perspectives on marriage. One of the central questions this study raises is the degree to which the dramatic works of early modern Spain conform to the morality espoused by the treatises that defined marriage at the time. While the tone of prescriptive discourses contrasts with the lyrical voices of the Spanish stage, both reveal a number of inherent-and compelling-contradictions in their views of the conjugal bond.

Read more less

Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain, edited by Nancy Vosburg and Jacky Collins, focuses exclusively on manifestations of lesbian cultures and identities in contemporary Spain. Bringing together key essays from a range of international scholars, this anthology of critical essays examines the changing cultural, sociological and political landscape of Spain at the turn of the millennium. Divided into two sections, the first contributions focus on the realities of lesbian lives and looks at how Spanish lesbian identities are constructed through language and the media. The essays in the second section analyze contemporary lesbian identities as manifested in novels and short stories published since the late 1980s by authors such as Carme Riera, Lola van Guardia, Flavia Company and Mabel Galán. The aim of this volume is to provide a significant and coherent contribution in English to the body of knowledge within an evolving subject area that has remained relatively under-researched until recently. Throughout the anthology, the visibility of the lesbian subject in Spain, either within the media, literature, the Parliament, and even within the gay book-publishing industry, emerges as a key concept for analyzing the status of lesbians in Spanish society. All essays in our volume are original, previously unpublished works written specifically for this volume by contributors who have been involved in researching or developing lesbian cultures in Spain. Lesbian Realities/Fictions in Contemporary Spain brings knowledge into the public domain that hitherto has remained hidden, and provides access to an audience interested in social and cultural change in Spain and yet who are unable to access material in Spanish. It is a particularly invaluable resource for teachers and students of Spanish cultural studies, global sexuality, and gender studies.

Read more less

Jane Austen and Masculinity is an eclectic collection of contemporary scholarship addressing the representation of men and masculinity in the fiction and popular adaptations of Austen. This anthology includes work by a variety of esteemed and emergent Austen scholars from around the world who engage in a dialogue on critical questions surrounding her fictional treatment of men and masculinity, such as historical (post-French Revolutionary) changes in social expectations for men and women, brothers and fathers, male lovers, soldiers and the military, queer and alternative sexualities, violence, and male devotees of Austen. The collection addresses Austen’s fiction, including her juvenilia, as well as the ongoing popular appeal of her work and the enduring Austen vogue. The work in this anthology builds on established critical discourses in Austen scholarship as well as important conversations in Masculinity Studies.

Read more less

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.

Read more less

When talking about the Enlightenment, ornithology is seldom the first topic of conversation. Still, Enlightenment and ornithology converge in one important respect, that of abundance. In our time, new-wave ornithologists have renewed their faith in eighteenth-century expectations for the discovery of a gigantic number of bird species. It is at this intersection between abundant modern science and ambitious Enlightenment ideology that this remarkable collection of five essays on Alexander Wilson (1766-1813), the father of American ornithology, makes its original and delightful contribution. Alexander Wilson: Enlightened Naturalist recovers Wilson’s literary, artistic and musical pursuits, and the cultural contexts of his life in the Scotland of Robert Burns. It also explores Wilson’s scientific and philosophic contribution to American ornithology in American Ornithology; or The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, published in Philadelphia between 1808 and 1814. Alexander Wilson is richly illustrated, links to a web site of audio readings of Wilson’s Scots poems– links that are embedded in the ebook–and includes a tribute to the late Edward H. Burtt, Jr., who died shortly before publication.

Read more less

In this memoir, Sascha Feinstein recounts life with his father, Sam Feinstein, who was both a brilliant artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage.

Read more less

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

Read more less

Central to all post-Renaissance scholarship, textual studies continues to evolve, both in its techniques and methods as well as in the illumination it affords all other areas of modern knowledge. The life of our fellow human beings, and how we know and tell lives, is one such area of modern knowledge that is foundationally affected by theories and practices of textual creation, transmission, and apprehension. This collection of new essays and studies by internationally acclaimed scholars, along with a select few who are less acclaimed but of distinct promise, provides a view into the contemporary state of scholarship in textual and biographical studies. The collection also means to be of especial interest to scholars of the British eighteenth century, by concentrating its evidence and argument on topics and subjects important to contemporary eighteenth-century studies. The volume is inspired by the extensive contributions to the fields by the late O M Brack, Jr.

Read more less

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

Read more less

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid “lady travelers” who ventured into the geography of the New World—Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean—at a crucial historical juncture, the period of political anarchy following the break from Spain and the rise of modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling as historians, social critics, ethnographers, and artists, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806–82), Maria Graham (1785–1842), Flora Tristan (1803–44), Fredrika Bremer (1801–65), and Adela Breton (1849–1923) reshaped the map of nineteenth-century Latin America. Organized by themes rather than by individual authors, this book examines European women’s travels as a spectrum of narrative discourses, ranging from natural history, history, and ethnography. Women’s social condition becomes a focal point of their travels. By combining diverse genres and perspectives, women’s travel writing ushers a new vision of post-independence societies. The trope of pilgrimage conditions the female travel experience, which suggests both the meta-end of the journey as well as the broader cultural frame shaping their individual itineraries.

Read more less

Scholars, librarians, students, and database vendors have all applauded the increase in access to rare, old, venerated, and obscure texts that has resulted from the rise of electronic resources. Almost everyone associated with any branch of cultural history has heard the claims about unlimited research opportunity and the rediscovery of overlooked sources. But are these claims true? Have high-tech systems and methods enhanced or inhibited scholarship? Nowhere is this question more pressing than in the area of eighteenth-century studies, where so much of the subject matter relates to the first wave of informational abundance: to that great period of profuse printing during which presses produced a mass market full of diverse readers. Textual Studies and the Enlarged Eighteenth Century probes the assumptions about the advanced tools that may be replicating this period of profusion among contemporary scholars. How much access to “period” information do current cost and present institutional support really allow? Who is accessing what—and who is not? Which authors and which topics get lost in the processor-driven shuffle? How do electronic tools bias scholarship? What are the disadvantages of databases? These and many more questions receive a brisk and robust review in this first critique of new-wave research. A variety of acclaimed scholars from an interdisciplinary array of specialties look at topics ranging from legacy bibliographical projects to standards for online editions to para-textual materials to the appropriateness of importing electronic research techniques into the study of a low-tech period and on to the transatlantic exchange of information in both the early modern and the present periods. Scholars in all fields will benefit from this vigorous analysis of the assumptions underlying the tools and the methods of twenty-first century humanities scholarship.

Read more less

A Race of Female Patriots argues that public-spirited women proliferated on the eighteenth-century British stage to catalyze an affective experience of political belonging, as dramatists imagined new forms of affiliation, allegiance, and loyalty suitable to the new British constitution established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Brett D. Wilson examines both staples of the repertory (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore) and lesser-known plays (Liberty Asserted, The Revolution of Sweden, Edward and Eleonora) to define the parameters of a prevalent yet under-examined dramatic mode: “civic” dramas that use scenes of political strife and private distress to stage the fashioning of communities around women. Onstage, women act to benefit the public—crucially, Wilson argues, by infusing the commonwealth with sentimental ardor: public spirit. Playwrights like Nicholas Rowe, Catharine Trotter, John Dennis, and James Thomson make the female-centered unions they imagine into synecdoches for a British nation transformed from turmoil to harmony. Restoring to view key neglected texts that portray women who feel deeply as agents of inclusion and icons of civic virtue, A Race of Female Patriots is a persuasive study of tragic drama at a time of great political change that yields new insight into the relation between women, feeling, and the public sphere.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Romantic Empiricism is a timely collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, which represents a paradigm shift for the study of British Romanticism. The volume challenges the received view that German Idealist philosophy constitutes the main intellectual reference point for British Romantic writers, arguing instead that the tradition of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, largely overlooked by literary scholars, is a significant influence on Romantic thought. The essays in the collection examine a variety of canonical and non-canonical Romantic authors in the light of this fresh interpretative context, ranging from Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton to Robert Burns and S.T. Coleridge. The volume is prefaced by a substantial theoretical introduction, which sets out the historical and interpretative case for the relevance of Common Sense philosophy for the study of British Romanticism.

Read more less

Working Through Memory studies various constructions of memory in contemporary Spanish literature, evoking different aspects of a past of repression, from both the civil war and the Franco regime. Ferrán analyzes narrative texts published between the 1960s and 1990s that present memory and the recuperation of a traumatic past as their main theme. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of memory, this book examines how each text presents a meta-narrative reflection of the very process of memory production, of how it is written and rewritten, recounted or repressed, transmitted or forgotten. Drawing particularly on trauma theory, Ferrán argues that the analyzed texts provide effective models for what Freud called "working through" memory. This process is shown to be effective as it unsettles dominant historical discourses in the present, allowing for the pain and suffering of the victims of a traumatic past to emerge through various forms of narrative disruption and fragmentation.

Read more less

Why does history traditionally divide the past along national, continental, and oceanic lines? Understanding some of the methods historians have used to analyze the past, and understanding the particular relationship between 'history' and 'nation,' seems crucial at this time of increasing globalization, and of new notions 'nation building.' The essays in this volume reflect upon the activity of historians when they consider the relationship between history and nation, and they explore how early modern historians have envisioned and theorized their own actions and impact. What are the conceptual tools historians use to investigate the history of nations? What is the political and ideological content of these tools? What role does language play in historical and cultural understanding? And what force does translation exert on the status of historical evidence? History and Nation explores such questions in a new consideration of historiography and methodology at a time when the concepts of both 'history' and 'nation' are in transition.

Read more less