Search results for ""bucknell university press""

This book elucidates early modern attitudes toward women's public display. It is a cultural study that draws on a wide range of literary and non-literary texts from 1650-1700 to revisit the sites where women appeared most prominently: the playhouse, the park, and the New Exchange (a shopping arcade in the Strand). An academic study, Outward Appearances is written in a clear and engaging style. It is aimed particularly at literary scholars, but historians will take a keen interest in it as well. It offers a fresh context for the study of Restoration drama and a provocative argument about women and public space.

Read more less

Women Writing the Nation engages in recent discussions of the development of British nationalism during the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Leanne Maunu argues that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender identity to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Women writers wanted to make it seem as if they were writing as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community. In essence, because British-French relations dominated the national imagination, women had to think about their own gender concerns in national terms as well.

Read more less

This book is the first work in the English language to discuss the participation of women writers in the narrative construction of Mozambican nationhood over the past half-century. Covering the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in the 1950s, the advent of the Marxist-Leninist Republic in the 1970s, the war that followed independence in the 1980s, and the transition to democracy and the neo-liberal economy in the 1990s, the volume focuses on four representative women writers who belong to distinct but overlapping periods and work in different genres. Dealing with Noémia de Sousa's poetry, Lina Magaia's testimonial writings, Lília Momplé's short fiction, and Paulina Chiziane's novels, the result is a close reading of the ways in which women have narrated and counter-narrated Mozambican nationhood to take account of the gendered power relations that traditionally underpin national community as imagined by men.

Read more less

Quixotic Modernists gives close readings of two novels by two little-studied writers of the early twentieth century in Spain, Felipe Trigo's Les ingénues (1909) and María Marínez Sierra's Tú eres la paz (1906), in relation to the canonical Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. By doing so, the study reveals the modern message (regarding gender), and modernist qualities of the prose of these works. Included are discussions of Quijote intertexts, proverbial language and tactics, the angel and the "muder-niña," flower, water, and animal imagery, and visual arts in relation to gender definition. Also included are contemporary responses to the novels and material about the authors' lives and Spain's social conditions in the early twentieth century. Quixotic Modernists integrates these themes into a study of the novelization of difficulties in transforming contemporary gender and class roles. In all three authors' works, this process of change in roles for both men and women becomes a quixotic enterprise, in which artists as/and characters search to reconnect with an elusive material, social body.

Read more less

In this age of overweening global capital and omnipresent electronic media, many critics have diagnosed western culture as suffering from a kind of historical obliviousness, a mass inability to situate our lived experience within the temporal flow of past, present, and future that is history. Within this historically bankrupt culture, representations of history in whatever medium - cinema, television, print - most often become mere fashion, the quotation of past styles devoid of historical gravitas. Against this, Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical Imagination argues that many contemporary American theatre and performance artists are not only developing innovative strategies for staging history but helping us reimagine our relationship with the past. Some of the plays and performances examined here include Suzan-Lori Park's Venus, Wendy McLeod's The House of Yes, the Wooster Group's production of Eugene O'Neill's The Empire Jones, and Robert Wilson's staging of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine.

Read more less

If we do not, at some point in our life, face death—thinking hard and straight about it— we turn away from our authenticity. If that facing rejects irrational faith, dogmas, mystification, and personal immortality, is there yet a path free of despair? David Martin argues that participatory pantheism—the experience of the secular and the sacred both as a unity and as a mystery—provides such a path. As we age, the future shortens and the past lengthens. But if we face death, more and more memories—especially the involuntary—are stirred up and cohere into stronger, as well as new, unities. What paradise there is for th elderly is not so much in what is happening but in remembering what happened in a meaningful way. For Dr. Martin, transformation of memory into the memorable is the transcendent meaning each of us can wrest from our coming to death. Since nature is our home, Dr. Martin reasons, the more we think participatively (thinking from ) rather than only objectively (thinking at), the more we are aware of the mystery and the majesty of that home. The more we know about our world and ourselves, the more we can understand how much we don't know. This kind of thinking is a thanking. It brings us within the sacred. We are anchored, and the churning of change no longer sweeps us away.

Read more less

Romancing the Novel examines the ways in which romance forms the characteristic "boys' books" - as exemplified in the novels of Scott, Dumas, Verne, and Stephenson - influence narratives not generally put in the same category - both in psychoanalytic accounts of the psyche and in novels by George Eliot, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph Conrad, and W.G. Sebald. Adventure privileges masculinity but also reveals an extraordinary ambivalence toward it, since the truly seductive masculine figures in such fictions are always finally exiled from the center of the social consensus. Moreover, the use of the romantic plot creates narrative distortions and ethical dilemmas that repeat across time and genre. It remains impossible to imagine a female hero on the model of Scott's "blank hero" (in Lukács term): girls and women are required to be hard-working, clever, and resourceful, while boys and men succeed merely by being. Centuries after Scott, the recognizable codes of gender and class he inaugurated continue our sense of the narratable.

Read more less

This volume assembles new thinking on the theory, practice, and cultural value of the history of literary criticism. Focusing on a theme that has attracted relatively little developed theoretical commentary hitherto, the authors of these essays draw on specialist areas of critical history - and different kinds of problems - to illustrate the paradoxes that attend any attempt to write the history of critical writing. Commentary begins with medieval literary theory, explores the social dimension of restoration criticism, the relations between poetry and criticism, and a test case in eighteenth-century criticism's reception aesthetics. Other essays consider relations between eighteenth-century critical and literary history, between romanticism and New Historicism, and the various ways in which present and past criticism is interrelated. In an introduction to the volume, the editor calls for a clearer confrontation with the representational issues of critical history by those who write about the critical past.

Read more less

Ziad Elmarsafy explores the concept of freedom by reading the works of Corneille, Pascal, and Racine as political theories in the guise of literature. Within this framework, a certain model quickly becomes apparent, namely that of absolute sovereignty as the guarantor of freedom. The three writers under consideration share the view that freedom is ensured only by absolute authority rather than the absence of such authority. From Corneille, who modulates freedom through an erotic link to the monarch as a means through which the glorious individual is brought into the state's fold, to Pascal, who traces the liberation of the will via absolute submission to God, to Racine, for whom absolute submission to the most Christian king is the only route to political and personal salvation, Elmarsafy studies a politics of taking charge that differs markedly from the contemporary orthodoxy that privileges individual freedom. Historically engaged, incisively argued, and persuasively written, Freedom, Slavery, and Absolutism will appeal to literary scholars, to political theorists and to readers interested in the history of ideas.

Read more less

Through a detailed and thoughtful study of the impact of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy on Olson's aesthetic theory, this book points out the conceptual unity underlying what seems to be a sprawl of fragments in Olson's major work, The Maximus Poems. It is a systematic analysis of the specific ways in which Whitehead's philosophy offered Olson a way to combine a scientific and mythopoeic view of time and space. From this, Olson constructed a poetic that could renew human contact with the external world and rid poetry of the traditional western imperial ego. The author uses Olson's philosophical investment in Whitehead in order to explain not only the content of Olson's verse, but its formal, structural elements. It illuminates Olson's theory of the Long Poem as an "all-containing" corpus, governed by the metaphysical principles, equal to life itself, enacted in the process of working on The Maximus Poems.

Read more less

Borrowed Words addresses the apparent paradox that underpins the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: the fact that nations at different narrative stages become contiguous literary markets. It focuses on translations and imitations of foreign literary models and on their role in setting up the bases of the bourgeois Spanish novel. While critics have viewed translations and imitations as alien to Spanish processes of cultural formation, the book argues that these writing practices constitute both a discourse on national identity and an autochthonous writing. The book contends that the acceptance of translation and imitation in the literary life of a country does not imply denying the specific conditions created by political borders in the constitution of a national literature, that is, the existence of national borders framing literary live. What it does is recognize new and different frontiers that destabilize the national confines (as well as the nationalistic values) of literary history. In translation and imitation, borders are experienced not as the demarcation of otherness, but rather as crossroads in the quest of identity. Martí-López explores these issues using a group of books whose existence is intimately linked to the massive exportation of French cultural paradigms (in particular, models of novel writing) to Spain: the Spanish translations and imitations of Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843). The analysis of these works reveal the rise of the novel in mid-nineteenth-century Spain as the result of both a poetics of aesthetic displacement and marketing practices - book production and the reception of foreign models.

Read more less

What can we know about the understanding of time in a particular cultural or historical setting, and what can this knowledge tell us about how we think about time today? Time and Ways of Knowing: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette raises these questions by examining the scientific measurement and perception of time in seventeenth-century Europe and particularly in France. This widely researched book argues that the technological and social changes relating to time have a paradoxical impact in seventeenth-century France; they lead to more control of the individual, thus intruding upon the realm of the private, and at the same time encourage the development of a newfound sense of privacy and subjectivity, partly in reaction to the increasing control of the individual by the state. This Foucaludian hypothesis is compellingly developed through a number of critical readings in historical contexts: the social framework of court life under Louis XIV is made to shed light on Molière's theatrical time; an analysis of early modern French postal reform reveals that concertedly diurnal nature of Mme de Sévigné's letters; and the consideration of early French periodicals evoks readers' reactions to Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a novel whose discourses proposed a new kind of narrative time. A conclusion connects early modern historical questions of human temporality to present-day environmental conerns. Time and Ways of Knowing is an original, interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture, and of the philosophy of science, as wlel as to those interested in narrative, temporality, and questions of disciplinary.

Read more less

Political Bodies is one of the first studies to link recent developments in Latin American literature to the rise of new social movements in the late 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on literary works in the context of the Chilean women's movement and resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship, Alice Nelson contends that the recent struggle for narrative power in Chile has been a contest about gender ideologies. Furthermore, she argues that this contest has been enacted literally and figuratively on the stage of human bodies as sites of domination and resistance. Examining works by Pía Barros, Davide Benavente and the Taller de Investigación Teatral, Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Isabel Allende, Political Bodies engages emergent feminist critiques of authoritarianism in terms of gender and class, history and language, Nelson persuasively argues that the cultural forms of resistance produced under Pinochet anticipated both the achievements and the shortcomings of Chile's democratic transition form the late 1980s through the present Concertación.

Read more less

This first book-length study of Irish poetry about the First World War, examines the extent to which the war has been preserved and appropriated in Irish memory. While the early chapters explore the various historical myths about IrelandOs role in the war and review the war verse written by Irish soldier poets, the attention later shifts to Irish poets on the various home fronts who express a wide range of attitudes toward the war.

Read more less

Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum offers an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relationship between British Romantic poetry and the rise of national museum culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In a simultaneously theoretical and historical analysis, it studies a range of poetry and aesthetic philosophy in relation to the first hundred years of the British Museum, from its establishment in the 1750's to the completion of its current edifice in the 1850's. It thereby provides a sequence of aesthetic reflections on the various social, cultural, and imaginative challenges posed by this novel institution. In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poetic Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics. Both the museum and the nation it serves are realized imaginatively through an imperfect aesthetic accommodation of difference and identity. The museum's official statements of institutional purpose and curatorial design describe a harmonious relationship between an ennobling exhibition and a unified nation. However, accounts of the institution in the popular press, guidebooks to the sights of London, private correspondence, and parliamentary debates depict the museum as a touchstone for social and political conflict. In this fraught domain of national self-promotion, the language of aesthetics provides a nascent curatorial theory of material and cultural reconciliation. An emphasis on the pleasures of imagination grants the poet and spectator especially prominent positions in Romantic culture as both are newly empowered as active participants in the visual and conceptual creation of knowledge. As this role is made available to an ever-widening portion of the national public-including women and members of the working classes-both the nation and the museum dev

Read more less

In Unhomely Rooms, Roberto Ignacio Díaz explores the practice of writing in English and French by Spanish American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Traditionally, writers such as the Contesse Merlin (a Cuban-French author) and W.H. Hudson (The Anglo-American best known for his ornithological works) have been excluded from the established discussion of Spanish-American literature because they wrote in a language other than Spanish. Seeking to revise the notion that "heterolingualism" should lead to literary-historical elision, Díaz underscores the ties that bind the works of these authors to the Spanish American literary canon. Through his close readings of texts by Merlin and Hudson, as well as María Luisa Bombal, G. Cabrera Infante, and Carlos Fuentes, foreign tongues emerge as valid. If perplexing, tools of writing for Spanish Americans. Even as he exposes the cultural fragmentation of Spanish America, Díaz's critical gesture allows strangeness to become an integral part not only of individuals, as Freud argues in "The Uncanny," but also of national cultural communities.

Read more less

Sensual Reading is a collection of essays that attempts to rearticulate the relationship between reading and the different senses as a way of moving beyond increasingly homogenized discourses of the ‘‘body’’ and the ‘‘subject.’’ Contributions engage with the individual senses, with the themes of sensory richness and sensory deprivation, and with the notion of ‘‘telesensuality.’’

Read more less

Foreigners in the Homeland charts the course of Hispanic inter-literary relations during the 1960's and 1970's through analysis of the reception of "Boom" novelists and texts in Spain. Little consideration has hitherto been given to the cultural significance of this development. Working from an expanded notion of national literature that critiques traditional notions of literary influence and national origin, this well-documented and theoretically sophisticated book argues for the "Boom" novel as one of the leading models for fictional writing at this time. This argument complicates and enriches the understanding of the impact of Spanish American novelists on their Iberian peers. Mario Santana thus fills a void in the literary histories of both Spain and Latin America. He examines the conjunction of a number of crucial developments in Spanish economics, politics, and the arts: the expansion of the Spanish book industry and its literary markets; the turn to Latin America as the primary site of revolutionary hopes for the European (and Spanish) left; and the crisis of social realism as the dominant model for Spanish fiction. Unusually comprehensive in scope and rich in literary-historical narrative, Foreigners in the Homeland is an original and important contribution to the study of the contemporary novel of both Spanish America and Spain.

Read more less

Archival Reflections explores the works of Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Julio Cortázar of Argentina, and Ismael Reed and E. L. Doctorow of the United States from two innovative perspectives—the new forms of the historical novel and the current debate on postmodernism. It explores North-South relations in the Americas and the question of cultural borders within the New World order. It has implications for the literary histories of Spanish America and the United States, as well as for the fields of inter-American and cultural studies, literary theory, and historiography.

Read more less

Mühsam, a German Jewish revolutionary activist and writer, was one of the most colorful figures of the German revolutionary counterculture early in the twentieth century. Written in 1930, Thunderation was his last full-length play before his death at the hands of the Nazis. This is the first of Mühsam's literary works to appear in English translation.

Read more less

This book is an examination of how gems and jewelry contributed to elaborating the expressiveness of the Hispanic literary movement known as Modernismo. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the use of bejeweled images in Parnassianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Decadentism, and Symbolism are shown to have significantly influenced ModernismoOs aesthetics. The underlying premise is that precious gem imagery was not an accessory but fundamental to ModernismoOs innovations in poetic expression.

Read more less

This study of the works of James Joyce, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, finds an Aristotelian underpinning for much of Joyce’s thinking on language and representation. In much of his writing, Joyce deals with the tension between visual and auditory modes of experiencing and representing.

Read more less

This book examines IbsenOs plays as well as his letters, poems, and speeches for the possible influence of paradigms from Hellenic culture, taking into account his relationship with German culture and German scholarsO esteem for the culture of the ancient Greeks.

Read more less

The title of this book, Forever Pursuing Genesis, derives from a statement that Vonnegut once made about the nature of the universe and humankind's place in it.

Read more less

This work's exegesis of the miracle story about a hemorrhaging woman shows woman to be a significant community member, role determiner, and voice of God to the ancient Christian communities.

Read more less

This book is a critical study of the work of Gregory Rabassa, translator of such canonical novels as Gabriel Garcìa Márquez's Cien años de soledad, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso, and Julio Cortàzar's Rayuela. During the past five decades, Rabassa has translated over fifty Latin American novels and to this day he is one of the most prominent English translators of literature from Spanish and Portuguese. Rabassa's role was pivotal in the internationalization of several Latin American writers; it led to the formation of a canon and, significantly, to the most prevalent image of Latin American literature in the world. Even though Rabassa's legacy has been widely recognized, the extent of his work's influence and the complexity of the sociocultural circumstances surrounding his practice have remained largely unexamined. In Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy, María Constanza Guzmán examines the translator's conceptions about language, contextualizes his work in terms of the structures and conditions that have surrounded his practice, and investigates the role his translations have played in constructing collective narratives of Latin American literature in the global imaginary. By revisiting and historicizing the translator's practice, this book reveals the scale of Rabassa's legacy. The translator emerges as an active subject in the inter-American literary exchange, an agent bound to history and to the forces involved in the production of culture.

Read more less

Freedom to Believe is a powerful collection of philosophical and religious essays by a modern poet of distinction. It introduces a highly original and controversial thinker to the Western reader. Olga Sedakova's central philosophical thought lies in the notion of existential freedom in its association with the liberating power of the arts, especially poetry. These convictions place her firmly in the Russian and European classical cultural traditions, which, in turn, have deep roots in Christianity. Devoutly Orthodox yet fiercely independent in her thinking, Sedakova's ecumenical humanism places her in opposition to both the "new left" and modern fundamentalism. Indeed, Sedakova's "conservatism" is more genuinely new than the so-called radicalism of the postmodernists, as she castigates "old totalitarianism" and new commercialism alike, in the name of a new cultural poetics and politics.

Read more less

This books attends to what in French, since the 1980s, has been called the passeur, the figure of the intellectual, mediator, translator or journalist, who is also a socialized being in the world. The volume sets out from biographical contexts in such a way that the work as a whole is offered as a gallery of portraits leading from one kind of cultural understanding to another and then another... Geographically, the range is broadly European (England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) though the aim is never to display how national identities arose. Nor is this range a matter of ‘covering’ the field. The figures treated were all important in their own right, and yet too often they receive scholarly attention only in passing. The singular identity studied here, if there is one, could be Europe’s, but the theme emphasized now and then is also that of the ‘internationalization’ of intellectual activity in a very long eighteenth century. The bookend chapters involving the understanding of the Orient reinforce the internationalization and the fostering of a European identity. The volume aims less to highlight or track specific ideas transported from one cultural context to another, though there are necessarily many examples given. It proposes instead to illustrate the evolution of post-humanist cultural activity in Europe, by beginning with a series of studies in which debate arises from religious positions (not only Protestant, but Muslim, Catholic, Jesuit, Jansenist and Jewish traditions) and closing with debate become philosophical and encyclopedic. As such, the volume documents a characteristic view of the transformation of early modern intellectual activity as its center moves from religion to philosophy; and it thereby draws special attention to the essays in the middle of the volume. These deal with figures active towards the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, and their abilities, difficulties and conflicts in finding new spaces for intellectual life outside of religious and political institutions—in public discussions of philosophy, toleration, journalism, law and the curious spatialization we refer to as Anglophilia.

Read more less

Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture. Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people. Moreover, human beings’ (specifically Western humans) ability to smell has been diminished through a process of increased emphasis on odor-removal, hygienic practices that emphasize de-odorization (rather than the covering of one odor by another). While other intangibles of the human experience have been placed into the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of discussions of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste. The past decade has seen a great expansion of our understanding of how smell works physiologically, psychologically, and culturally, and there is no better moment than now to attempt to recover the traces of olfactory perceptions, descriptions, and assumptions. Reading Smell provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the novel. The multiplication and development of the novel overlaps strikingly with changes in personal and private hygienic practices that would alter the culture’s relationship to smell. This book examines how far the novel can be understood through a reintroduction of olfactory information. After decades of reading for all kinds of racial, cultural, gendered, and other sorts of absences back into the novel, this book takes one step further: to consider how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked olfactory assumptions might reshape our understanding of these texts. Reading Smell includes wide-scale research and focused case studies of some of the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction. Highlighting scents with shifting meanings across the period: bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur, Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.

Read more less

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

Read more less

New Lenses for Lorca: Literature, Art, and Science in the Edad de plata examines the influence of science in the thought, creative process, writing, and drawing of Federico García Lorca. This book establishes the historical, cultural, and biographical context in which Lorca encountered scientists and their work, and studies the writing and drawing of scientists he came to know at the Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid. Several of Lorca’s contemporaries who were also exploring science’s possibilities for their work in writing, art, and philosophy, including José Ortega y Gasset, Salvador Dalí, and Gregorio Marañón, are read alongside the poet. By reading particular texts among Lorca’s lectures, letters, poetry, theater, and drawings through the lens of the memoirs, lectures, and drawings of scientists such as Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Pío del Río-Hortega, a working poetics is established for each and comparisons are drawn. References to science in Lorca’s work open a new reading of some of his texts. At the same time, Ramón y Cajal and del Río-Hortega’s drawing and writing are analyzed as plastic and rhetorical works of art. The result is a study of the creative process in artist and scientist alike and their mutual influence.

Read more less

This volume compiles and annotates for the first time the complete correspondence of the eighteenth-century British author Charlotte Lennox, best known for her novel The Female Quixote. Lennox corresponded with famous contemporaries from different walks of life such as James Boswell, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and she interacted with many other influential figures including her patroness the Countess of Bute, publisher Andrew Millar, and the Reverend Thomas Winstanley. In addition to Lennox’s and her correspondents’ letters, this book presents related documents such as the author’s proposals for subscription editions of her works, her file with the Royal Literary Fund, and a series of poems and stories supposedly composed by her son but perhaps written by herself. In these carefully and extensively annotated documents, Charlotte Lennox traces the vagaries in the career of a female writer in the male-dominated eighteenth-century literary marketplace. The introduction situates Lennox in the context of contemporaneous print culture and specifically examines the contentious question of the authorship of The Female Quixote, Lennox’s experimentation with various forms of publication, and her appeals for charity to the Royal Literary Fund when she was impoverished towards the end of her life. The author who emerges from Charlotte Lennox was an active, assertive, innovative, and independent woman trying to find her place—and make a literary career—in eighteenth-century Britain. Thus, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of female authorship, literary history, and eighteenth-century studies.

Read more less

This book explores the ways in which five female radical novelists of the 1790s—Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft—attempted to use the components of private life to work toward widespread social reform. These writers depict the conjugal family as the site for a potential reformation of the prejudices and flaws of the biological family. The biological family in the radical novels of female writers is fraught with problems: greed and selfishness pervert the relationships between siblings, and neglect and ignorance characterize the parenting received by the heroines. Additionally, the radical novelists, responding to representations of biological families as inherently restrictive for unmarried women, develop the notion of marriage to a certain type of man as a social duty. Marriage between two properly sensible people who have both cultivated their reason and understanding and who can live together as equals, sharing domestic responsibilities, is shown to be an ideal with the power to create social change. Positioning their depictions of marriage in opposition to earlier feminist depictions of female utopian societies, the female radical novelists of the 1790s strive to depict relationships between men and women that are characterized by cooperation, individual autonomy, and equality. What is most important about these depictions is their ultimate failure. Most of the female radical novelists find such marriages nearly impossible to conceptualize. Marriage, for many of the female radical novelists, was an institution they perceived as inextricably related to (male) concerns about property and inescapably patriarchal under the marriage laws of late eighteenth-century British society. Unions between two worthy individuals outside the boundaries of marriage are shown in the female radical novels to be equally problematic: sex inevitably is the basis for such unions, yet sex leaves women vulnerable to exploitation by men. Rather than the triumph, therefore, of what comes to be in these novels the male-associated values of property and power through marriage, the female radical novels end by suggesting an alternative community, one that will shelter those members of society who are most frequently exploited in male attempts to accumulate this property and power: women, servants, and children.

Read more less

The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful—and for that reason, contested—ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meaning. The regular progression of chronological time accentuated the deviance of anachronism and ephemerality, while the opposition of unique artifacts to ubiquitous commodities exoticized things that straddled this divide. Inspired by the authentic products as well as the anomalous by-products of contemporary scholarship, writers, craftsmen, and shoppers appropriated the past to create nostalgic and ironic alternatives to their own moment. Barrett Kalter explores the history of these “modern antiques,” including Dryden’s translation of Virgil, modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, Gray’s Gothic wallpaper, and Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Though grounded in the ancient and medieval eras, these works uncannily addressed the controversies about monarchy, nationhood, commerce, and specialized knowledge that defined the present for the English eighteenth century. Bringing together literary criticism, historiography, material culture studies, and book history, Kalter argues that the proliferation of modern antiques in the period reveals modernity’s paradoxical emergence out of encounters with the past.

Read more less

This is the first book-length study of female adolescence in the French novel of this period. It analyzes representations of the "world apart" of female adolescence in selected novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, several factors contributed to the shaping of a new social category for young women, which then gained increasing attention from writers. Art and life echoed one another, as novels about female adolescents created a social stir, and incited further discussion about the proper role for young women in French society. In this book, the author considers key novels of female adolescence from the period as a means of understanding the concerns and desires they embody. Examining these novels thematically and chronologically, Dr. Gale traces shifting social values and sexual roles and examines the ways in which various artistic, intellectual, or literary influences of each period shape its portraits of female adolescence. Novelists create their young female characters as French society undergoes parallel transformation. In this sense, female adolescents represent, for the novelists, the possible futures of France.

Read more less

This book explores Cervantes's connection with the representational schemes that dominated the political, moral, literary, and iconographic anxieties of the 1600s. Whereas most research on Cervantes's aesthetic and artistic models has focused on Southern sources (Italian and Spanish), this study expands this reference to include Northern (Flemish and Netherlandish) cultural influence. Through this artistic dialogue between North and South, the book investigates the interrelationship of politics and aesthetics, and how these are negotiated in Cervantes's works, especially in two novels, Don Quixote and The Dialogue of the Dogs.

Read more less

This volume analyzes Portuguese texts from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, reading them as symptoms of a haywire paternal function. Authors studied include Eça de Queirós, Almeida Garrett, António Lobo Antunes, José Régio, José Cardoso Pires, Helder Macedo, and Gomes de Amorim. Historical figures interrogated include Dom Sebastião, Prince Henry the Navigator, and the dictators Sidónio Pais and Salazar. A Lacanian framework provides the backdrop for much of the discussion, as Rothwell draws parallels in the cultural appropriations of the father figure at different historical moments. He argues that both nineteenth-century and contemporary Portuguese authors suggest that the wholesale abandonment of the paternal function in favor of the market transaction after revolutions comes at an intolerably high price for the Portuguese individual's psychic well-being. At the same time, Rothwell shows how paternal metaphors have consistently been corrupted in the Portuguese imaginary from the time of Fernão Lopes through the imperial expansion and decline to the twentieth-century dictatorships.

Read more less

Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), winner of the Premio Casa de las Amèricas (Poesía de paso, 1966), was one of Chile's most significant creative minds of the twentieth century. Surprising his predecessors, inspiring his contemporaries, and always venerated by younger inheritors of his legacy, he is as important to the Latin American literary community as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, or Nicanor Parra. This book provides a detailed study of all major stages of his literary production, from his third book, La pieza oscura [The Dark Room] (1963) to his posthumous Diario de Muerte [Diary of Dying] (1989). A critical introduction provides an orientation to Lihn's work as related to the critical apparatus of Western Marxism and postmodern theory. An additional auxiliary section comes between chapters two and three, accommodating the vary significant change in historical period from the pre- to post-Pinochet eras, and further investigating Theodor Adorno's provocative questioning of whether "art after Auschwitz" can truly exist.

Read more less

True Lies is a comprehensive study of the evolving functions of narrative self-consciousness in contemporary Spain. While the foundational studies of metafiction - by Alter, Scholes, Hutcheon, Waugh, Spires, and the others - have illustrated how self-conscious writing serves to blur the distinction between reality and fiction in order to draw attention to the dynamic processes of literary representation, True Lies takes into account a fundamental issue overlooked by earlier treatments of the genre: namely, the importance of consciousness itself to this type of fiction. In the contemporary Spanish cultural context, novelists have increasingly explored the role of narrative in the construction and understanding of the self. This books shows how recent novels by Rosa Montero, Nuria Amat, Javier Cercas, Juan José Millás, Javier Marías, and Carlos Cañeque use metafiction in order to question the relationship between reality and make-believe, to scrutinize the dynamic nature of personal identity; to problematize the historiographical enterprise; to evaluate critically the process of canon formation; and to parody themselves and the poetics of self-consciousness.

Read more less

Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of established and upcoming Haywood scholars who challenge much of the received opinion about this groundbreaking journal. Several of the essays show that Haywood's periodical was far more political than is generally thought, that its connections to her career as a novelist are more intimate than has been recognized, and that The Spectator was a target as well as a model. This collection makes a convincing argument that Haywood's periodical deserves far more critical attention than it has received so far and suggests new lines of development for future Haywood scholarship.

Read more less

This study deals with representation and resistance in Afro-Uruguayan culture. It explores the manner in which Afro- Uruguayans defined, and continue to affirm, their ‘‘place’’ in a country in which societal and self perceptions were/are constantly shifting.

Read more less

This volume is a collection of essays on various notions of the human state during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period in Germany. The book includes articles on Madame de Stael, Herder and India, Kant and race, Nicholas von Zinzendorf, Lichtenberg, the Brothers Grimm, and Humboldt.

Read more less

Ambivalent Desires: Representations of Modernity and Private Life in Colombia (1890s-1950s) is a literary and cultural study of the reception of modernity in Colombia. Unlike previous studies of Latin American modernization, which have usually focused on the public aspect of the process, this book discusses the intersection between modernity and the private sphere. It analyzes canonical and noncanonical works that reflect the existing ambivalence toward the modernizing project being implemented in the country at the time, and it discusses how the texts in question reinterpret, adapt, and even reject the ideology of modernity. The focus of the study is how the understanding of the relationship between modernity and private life relates to the project of constructing a modern nation, and the discontinuities and contradictions that appear in the process. The question of what modernity is, its implications for everyday life, and its desirability or undesirability as a new cultural paradigm were central issues in Colombian texts from the end of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. At stake was the definition of the nation's identity and the project of breaking away from the cultural patterns of the colonial past. Considering that the apparently peaceful process of modernization in Colombia was interrupted in the 1950s by the eruption of political violence across the country, this study situates itself on the eve of a crisis and asks how representations of modernity in texts from the period evidence the social fragmentation that may have led to it.

Read more less

The concept of a “postracial” America —the dream of a nation beyond race — has attracted much attention over the course of the presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that this idea is peculiar to the contemporary moment alone. Postracial America? An Interdisciplinary Study attempts to broaden the application of this idea by situating it in contexts that demonstrate how the idea of the postracial has been with America since its founding and will continue to be long after the Obama administration’s term ends. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of the postracial in the United States through a variety of critical lenses, including film studies; literature; aesthetics and conceptual thinking; politics; media representations; race in relation to gender, identity, and sexuality; and personal experiences. Through this diverse interdisciplinary exploration, this collection skeptically weighs the implications of holding up a postracial culture as an admirable goal for the United States.

Read more less

Mother Nature (1887) is the sequel to Emilia Pardo Bazán's most famous novel, The House of Ulloa, written one year earlier. It continues where the earlier work left off, when the priest, Julian, who had vainly struggled to protect the life and interests of the doomed mother of Manuela, sees the girl cavorting through the meadow with Perucho, who will turn out to be her half-brother. The reader will follow the course of the ill-starred relationship between the two, which turns from childish affection to romantic love.

Read more less

This book presents fifty illustrations of Landor's exceptional dexterity in Latin verse, showing his hostile treatment of political figures (including royalty), his relations with friends, his pleasures and sufferings as a lover, and his delight in the changing phases of nature. The long closing piece treats, within a mythological framework, the great forces that govern the world and its inhabitants. Landor offers an interesting contrast with Dr Johnson, who died in 1784 when Landor was nine and who is sometimes wrongly described as the last important writer with an inner command of Latin. First, though Landor was careless about money, and at times in serious trouble with debt, he had an inheritance which put him in a different position from Johnson's. Again, while some of Johnson's Latin poems show a deeply felt belief in religion, Landor's deities are those of classical paganism. Other points emerge from a consideration of what they owe to their Latin predecessors. Both draw on Vergil—especially on the pastorals (Eclogues). And both are indebted to Horace for the metrical forms which he took over from the Greeks and for his genial good sense. But Horace also wrote some abusive epodes on women (nos. 8 and 12) that, though shunned by the fastidious doctor, foreshadow Landor's attacks on Princess Caroline of Brunswick.

Read more less

An investigation into how Larra (pseudonym Fígaro) exposes the power relations that exist between and among individuals and the classes that form 'society,' this work provides a close reading in a postmodern vein of the satirical writer's duly famous articles penned and published mostly between March 1835 and the summer of 1836. Casting light on the development of Larra's thought on power relations at this critical stage of his political life, this study offers a chronological, step-by-step analysis of the evolution of Larra's thoughts on power and politics. Inspired by the practices of the new historicists, especially Michel Foucault, Schurlknight presents Larra's essays as the Romantic's own subversive discourse opposing the official discourses of truth that attempt to maintain, in the 1830s in Spain, the domination of an elitist minority over the other classes.

Read more less

Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean Literature is a compelling exploration of how authors of the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico) have incorporated the cultural legacy of Africa into their narrative fictions. This richly articulated study decodes and explores hidden layers of African-derived myths and symbolisms found in many of the major Spanish Caribbean works of prose fiction. Julia Hewitt ranges from the Afro-Cuban short stories of Lydia Cabrera and the historical novels of Alejo Carpentier, to the representation of the figure of the runaway slave—a foundational archetype of the Spanish Caribbean since the sixteenth century—to the contemporary salsa music-inspired narratives of the Puerto Ricans Edgardo Rodríguize Juliá, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ana Lydia Vega, and the provocative narratives of the contemporary Cuban writer, Zoé Valdés. Voices Out of Africa is an erudite, yet accessible and exhilarating, account of the multiple layers of the region's cultural expressions. In its scope, it does justice to the wealth and complexity of Caribbean culture; at the same time, it is a work of scholarship and theory that offers a near-encyclopedic perspective on Spanish Caribbean culture. Voices Out of Africa is the sort of book to which scholars and interested laypersons can return again and again to rummage through its pages in search of insights into Afro-Caribbean symbolism, myths, and cultural practices.

Read more less