Bøger udgivet af Bucknell University Press

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.

This collection of essays by distinguished scholars from various disciplines addresses the central question: 'Was Enlightenment a force for emancipation?' Their responses, working from within, and frequently across the disciplinary lines of history, political science, economics, music, literature, aesthetics, art history, and film, reveal unsuspected connections and divergences even between well-known figures and texts. In their turn, the essays suggest the need for further inquiry in areas that turn out to be very far from closed. The volume considers major writings in unusual juxtaposition; highlights new figures of importance; and demonstrates familiar texts to embody strange implications.

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

Culture and Consciousness argues that the vast interdisciplinary boom in consciousness research has enormous implications for literary and cultural studies, and that the potential benefits of this research in the twenty-first century are momentous. Its objective is to show how consciousness studies can help us reassess our approach to key issues and the fundamental assumptions of contemporary theory and criticism.

The Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture investigates the preoccupation with idleness that haunts the British eighteenth century. Sarah Jordan argues that as Great Britain began to define itself as a nation during this period, one important quality it claimed for itself was industriousness. But this claim was undermined and complicated by, among other factors, the importance of leisure to the upholding of class status, thus making idleness a subject of intense anxiety. One result of this anxiety was an increased surveillance of the supposed idleness of marginalized and less powerful members of society: the working classes, the nonwhite races, and women. In a widely researched and elegantly argued book, Jordan analyzes how idleness is figured in eighteenth-century literature and culture, including both traditional forms of literature and a wide variety of other cultural discourses. At the center of this account, Jordan investigates the lives and works of Johnson, Cowper, Thomson, and many other, lesser known writers. She incorporates their obsession with idleness into a new and lucid theorization of the professionalization of writing and the place of idleness and industry in the larger cultural formation that was eighteenth-century British identity.

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.

Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud explores how the riddle becomes a figure for reading and writing in early German Romanticism and how this model then enables Sigmund Freud's approach to the psyche. It traces a migration of ideas from literature to psychoanalysis and argues that the relationship between them must be situated at the methodological level. Through readings of texts by August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Ludwig Tieck Reading Riddles documents how the Romantics expand the field of poetic signification to include obscure, distorted signs and how they applied this rhetoric of obscurity to the self. The book argues that this model of self and signification plays a central role in the formulation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. If the self is a riddle, as many in the nineteenth century claim, Freud takes the figure seriously and interprets the mind according to all the structures and techniques of that textual genre.

This book on the role of written and iconographic communication in the Atlantic World combines a broad outlook, geographically and chronologically, with the precise treatment of specific evidence extracted from the sources. The author argues that diatribes against chivalric fiction and the Index of Prohibited Books did not prevent proscribed literature from circulating freely on both sides of the Atlantic. On the contrary, he notes, such prohibitions may have increased the lure of certain books. A description of the process of registering and inspecting ships in Seville and upon reaching their destinations highlights opportunities for contraband, smuggling, fraud, and the corruption of officials entrusted with regulating the trade. Within the prominent spiritual genre, the author documents a shift from Erasmian to Tridentine thinking. The registers analyzed also suggest the growing popularity of literary works by Cervantes, Mateo Alemn, and Lope de Vega. It opens a fascinating window onto the book trade in the Americas. Different forms of participation in this culture included the use of books as fetishes and the possession of printed devotional images. The analysis of books as well as printed images supports larger contentions about their role as agents of evangelization and westernization. This book certainly opens up new worlds on the impact of books and images in the Atlantic World.

Legitimizing the Queen deals with a genre particular to the Middle Ages: the specula principum (mirror of prince). Its importance as an object of study may be understood in light of the political instability that wracked the Castilian fifteenth century. The many works written for and dedicated to Isabel I of Castile depict her kingdom as a shipwrecked boat, a wayward realm, and a land of bankrupt people. These works suggest the kingdom's need for redemption through the strong leadership of the Catholic monarchs. These largely propagandistic works were designed to garner power, and once maintained, further Isabel's agenda. This book frames the concept of sovereignty from the theoretical perspective of the speculum principum dedicated to her. It offers a Bourdieuian approach to the more literary specula texts used to legitimize and uphold Isabel's power. This book reveals propagandistic qualities promoting the ideology necessary to legitimize and support Isabel's claims to the throne. Written primarily between 1468 and 1493, these works are literary artifacts that mark the rise to power of a female sovereign. The study discusses the various strategies of legitimation employed by these propagandists whose works circulated within noble and royal courts, and presumably extended into Castile as justification for her sovereign claim to the throne. By analyzing fifteenth century texts from within a modern critical framework, this book reexamines Isabel's position as queen and contributes to the understanding of her shared sovereignty in a period political and social evolution.

Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal,1600-1800 explores the oppositions created by the official exclusion of banned sexual practices and the resistance to that exclusion through widespread acceptance of those outlawed practices at an interpersonal level.

The book offers new perspectives on works that were central to the visual and literary culture of the Anglo-American world-ephemeral print-but which have received little scholarly attention in the past.

Catastrophic Bliss contemplates the longing to understand connections and disconnections within a world ever more fragmented yet interdependent. With allusions to Dante, Stevie Wonder, Fernando Pessoa, Persephone and Marianne Moore, these poems move from the tumultuous to the sublime: a pit bull killing an invading thief, two people on a New York City subway playing chess, Billy Eckstine recording in Rio de Janeiro, to an imagined Barack Obama writing poems to his father. Myronn Hardy's third collection comprises war, place, love, and history all yearning to be reconciled.

This collection reinvigorates Sheridan studies by presenting his spectacular life and extraordinary works in the intricate political, social, and cultural context of Georgian London. The author of The Rivals, The Duenna, The School for Scandal, and the The Critic was also an innovative theatrical manager, a flashy profligate, and the mainstay of political opposition in the decisive decades of the late eighteen and early nineteenth centuries.

The Letters and Early Epistolary Writings of Charles Brockden Brown gathers and presents, for the first time, the complete extant correspondence of a key American author, along with early manuscript fictions never before published and new scholarly work contextualizing and exploring the writings and their context. The volume is edited to highest scholarly standards and bears the seal of the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions.

Textual Studies and the Enlarged Eighteenth Century scrutinizes the culture and sometimes the cult of electronic and other technology-assisted scholarship with respect to eighteenth-century studies.

Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts (1845-1909) brings together essays, letters, short-stories, and public lectures by travelers, scientists, writers, and politicians about Darwin and the theory of evolution in nineteenth century Argentina. This selection of texts provides a thorough overview of the socio-ideological implications of the theory of evolution in South America, as well as the intellectual debate this scientific theory promoted in the discourses of fiction, law, history, and medicine in the formation of modern Argentina. Some writers in this book considered the theory of evolution to be Argentinean because Darwin first conceived his theory traveling in the Beagle, across ';the big cemetery of glyptodont and megatherium fossils' on the pampas and in Patagonia. This anthology includes texts from William H. Hudson, Francisco Muiz, Florentino Ameghino, Eduardo Holmberg, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Hermann Burmeister, the Perito Moreno, Leopoldo Lugones, Jose Mara Ramos Meja, and Jose Ingenieros, among others. Many of these texts have not been translated to English or reprinted until this edition, which was originally published with fewer texts in Spanish in 2008. Leila Gomez's introduction reconstructs the historical-scientific contexts of the Darwinist debate in Argentina, the role of paleontology as modern discipline in South American countries, and the tensions between metropolitan and local scientific knowledge. Both the anthology and the introduction present a panorama of Darwin and evolution in Argentina, and the complex mechanism of inclusion and exclusion of indigenous, African descendants, mestizos, and immigrants in the modern nation. Darwinism in Argentina provides critical perspectives on evolutionism in South America that will interest students and specialists in literature, history, and science.

Masculinity, Senses, Spirit brings together current work by leading scholars in the fields of gender studies, religion, history, and cultural studies to examine the complex interrelationship between gender, sexuality, and the realms of the spirit and the senses in the Atlantic world from the Eighteenth century to the present.

Radical Justice investigates the convoluted relationship between memory and justice in Spain and the Southern Cone as it is portrayed in political documentaries and detective fiction from Spain and the Southern Cone. It argues that the possibility of achieving justice in these regions lies beyond market and State and is yet to come. This book appeals to a wide range of scholars, ranging from national literature and film specialists of Argentina, Chile, and Spain, to philosophers and students of ethics, human rights, and questions of justice.

The Lazarillo Phenomenon addresses a fundamental question in Hispanic Studies, why do we continue studying La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes? As a classic literary text, Lazarillo's destiny depends on the relations it establishes over time with individuals and institutions responsible for literary, commercial, and ideological matters. This book brings together nine literary scholars from different critical approaches who address this question and reconsider the state of Lazarillo studies.The Lazarillo Phenomenon directs the reader's attention away from traditional concerns and toward different areas such as the complexities surrounding the production, transmission, and reception of the novel across time, and the wide-ranging social, historical, political, literary, economic, and religious circumstances in which it was written, banned, censured, and finally re-circulated. Contributors include Reyes Coll-Tellechea, María V. Jordán Arroyo, Ismene Kansí, Sean McDaniel, Joseph V. Ricapito, Theresa Ann Sears, Benjamín Torrico, Anthony Zahareas, and Oscar Pereira Zazo.

On the Dark Side of the Archive examines nineteenth-century nation building through narratives that are not part of the romantic or realist traditions, specifically those associated with the critique of traditional ideas often portrayed in Decadentism and modernismo. The study focuses on the "non-canonical" works of turn-of-the-century authors-including José María Vargas Vila, Horacio Quiroga, Clemente Palma, and José Martí-and concludes with a study that compares the literary portrayal of doomed societies in the nineteenth century with the work of contemporary authors, such as Fernando Vallejo. González Espitia establishes a critique of the concept of nation building in the romantic narratives of South America. These narratives are generally characterized by underlying erotic discourses meant to set the recently liberated countries of Latin America on a path toward class harmony, racial integration, socially beneficial marriage, and demographic expansion. An analysis of nation-building narratives understood as erotic discourses must also consider novels that manifest a dynamics of self-destruction. The authors included in this book subvert the idea of "nation" as a clear, positive, and fruitful space, bringing a dose of reality to this elusive concept. These authors design alternative futures for Latin America, futures that were seen as fruitless, obscure, contemptible, or doomed.

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.

Romantic Empiricism is a timely collection of essays by established and emerging scholars that 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.

Pagodas in Play examines the representation of China in nine Italian operas of the eighteenth century. It focuses specifically on libretti, analyzing them as texts produced in a variety of interpenetrating cultural contexts: the general European fascination with the Middle Kingdom; developments in Italian literary, theatrical, and operatic realms; Enlightenment ideologies; and the heterogeneity of the Italian states.

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

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. Ferran 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, Ferran 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.

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

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdós's first series of Episodios nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas Clarin's La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixoticism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.

Fair Philosopher, the first sustained scholarly study of The Female Spectator, brings together an impressive collection of new and established 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 argues 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.

The focus of Fictive Domains is the period 1717-1770, during which nostalgia was just beginning to emerge as a cultural concept. Using psychoanalytic, feminist, and materialist theories, this book examines representations of bodies and landscapes in the cultural production of the early- to mid-eighteenth century.