Bøger udgivet af Bucknell University Press

Secular Millenialism: The Train of Aesthetics from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett combines the perspectives of intellectual history, literary history, and political history in order to illuminate the operation of the idea of aesthetics, and of the historical actualization of that idea, in the background of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Regarding Santayana it has been claimed that he lacks a system while contradicting himself in outrageous ways. An attentive analysis of his complete uvre, however, reveals something else entirely. It is not easy to classify a thinker as a Platonic materialist, an ironic nihilist, a spiritual atheist, and a conservative without political commitment, but, if one respects his own language, one discerns an astonishing, little-known Santayana, whose philosophical leitmotif consists in: 1) detecting the numerous ';false steps,' logical and moral, supplied by the imagination when it confuses things with the names that designate them, or the world with the feelings that it provokes in the human animalthese errors assume diverse faces: pantheism, moralism, egotism, subjectivism, transcendentalism, Platonism, Puritanism, and utopianism; 2) avoiding these illusions in such a way as to keep the spiritual door open as a form of life to be lived out in an honest fashion; 3) recognizing the natural origin of these temptations and asking oneself what moves humans to succumb imperceptibly to these mistakes, at times tragic, at others comical, and what precautions one can take to remain cognizant of the deceitful leaps that can hijack one's life; and 4) proposing as an alternative the radical distinction between essence and existence, which leads him to distinguish four realms of being: the realm of essence, the realm of matter, the realm of truth, and the realm of spirit. Essence as logical identity, matter as contingent existence, truth as frozen history, and spirit as the flames that part from contingency and approximate the eternal. An attempt has been made in this book to expand on and clarify these questions.

The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.

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.

Global Tangos: Travels in the Transnational Imaginary argues against the hackneyed rose-in-mouth cliches of Argentine tango, demonstrating how the dance may be used as a way to understand transformations around the world that have taken place as a result of two defining features of globalization: transnationalism and the rise of social media. Global Tangos demonstrates the cultural impact of Argentine tango in the world by assembling an unusual array of cultural narratives created in almost thirty countries, all of which show how tango has mixed and mingled in the global imaginary, sometimes in wildly unexpected forms. Topics include Tango Barbie and Ken, advertising for phone sex, the presence of tango in political upheavals in the Middle East and in animated Japanese children's television programming, gay tango porn, tango orchestras and composers in World War II concentration camps, global tango protests aimed at reclaiming public space, the transformation of Buenos Aires as a result of tango tourism, and the use of tango for palliative care and to treat other ailments. They also include the global development of queer tango theory, activism, and festivals. Global Tangos shows how the rise in social media has heralded a new era of political activism, artistry, solidarity, and engagement in the world, one in which virtual global tango communities have indeed become very ';real' social and support networks. The text engages some key concepts from contemporary critics in the fields of tourism studies, geography, dance studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, transnational studies, television studies, feminism, and queer theory. Global Tangos underscores the interconnectedness of cultural identity, economics, politics, and power in the production, marketing, distribution, and circulation of global images related to tangoand, by extension, Latin Americathat travel the world.

Writing Teresa: The Saint from vila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jess ';boom' of roughly 18801930, and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period's interest in the Saint from vila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.

Comprising six full-length chapters, a comprehensive Introduction and Conclusion, this monograph is extensive in scale and scope. It provides fresh readings of key writings of Maritegui, one of Latin America's most important and revolutionary political, cultural and aesthetic theorists, through the lens of his poetics, emphasizing the value of this approach for a fuller understanding of his work's political meaning and impact. It does so through detailed analysis of the poetic, expressive language employed in seminal political essays, aimed at forging a new Marxist position in 1920s Peru. Furthermore, it offers powerful and original critiques of understudied intellectuals of this time, especially aprista-Futurist, Socialist and Indigenist female writers and artists, such as Magda Portal and ngela Ramos, whose work he championed. These readings are fully contextualized in terms of detailed critical study of complex sociopolitical conditions and positions, and bio-bibliographical, intellectual backgrounds of Maritegui and his contemporaries. The monograph examines and underscores the fundamental importance of Maritegui's, and their, politico-poetic practices and projects for forging a national-cum-cosmopolitan, shared, yet also heterogeneous, political culture and cultural tradition in 1920s Peru.

What is Film Noir? surveys the various theories of film noir, defines film noir, and explains how the genre relates to the style and the period in which noir was created. It also provides a very useful theory of genre and how it relates to film study.

The book stands as a new bench-mark in Smart studies for the twenty-first century. The essays explore the energy of Christopher Smart's wide-ranging participation in eighteenth-century print culture: not only his often unbuttoned and vigorous writings themselves, but also the multiple cultural fields in which he operated, which included poetry, journalism, hymns and songs, translation, the theatre and books for children; thus the book offers rich insights into eighteenth-century literary, political and cultural history.

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America rethinks the rise and fall of magical realism in Latin America in light of the cultural history of the emotions and in conversation with contemporary theories of affect.

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.

Coal Dust on Your Feet is a historical ethnography of Shamokin, Pennsylvania and its surrounding borough of Coal Township. This anthracite coal fueled the industrial revolution and its miners generated the rise of organized labor, both of which make the region of northeast Pennsylvania one of great economic and historic importance. The ethnographic field site of the study spans a century and a half as it looks at the history and ties to the home countries of the immigrants who established and worked the coal mines. Details of individual lives and family histories enliven accounts of industry and the struggles of the unions, means of livelihood, ethnicity, associational life and ceremonial occasions. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, scholars of urban studies and labor historians, and contributes to the canon of literature on community and sense of place. The study focuses on the rise and decline of the mining industry, on the ethnic groups that formed the town's neighborhoods, and on the changes that have taken place in ethnicity, religion, class and community. It covers the period of prosperity when the factories of the New York garment industry moved into town for the middle years of the twentieth century and made Shamokin a shopping mecca. Today, the town is decimated by economic decline and population loss, but ethnicity remains an identity option and still has economic content. The strong sense of place of the people of the town rooted in their cultural and militant heritage, has given rise to a wider community of former residents who return to visit, participate in events and buy ethnic foods and cultural items. This wider community of belonging and identity helps to boost morale, sense of community and economy, in what is now primarily a retirement town with commuters traveling to work in nearby cities.

Oliver Goldsmith (17281774) moved between the genres and geographies of enlightenment writing with considerable dexterity. As a consequence he has been characterized as a passive purveyor of enlightenment thought, a hack, a harried translator of the French enlightenment for an English audience, an ideological lackey, and a subtle ironist. In poetry, he is either a compliant pastoralist or an engaged social critic. Yet Goldsmith's career is as complex and as contradictory as the enlightenment currents across which he wrote, and there is in Goldsmith's oeuvre a set of themesincluding his opposition to the new imperialism and to glibly declared principles of libertywhich this book addresses as a manifestation of his Irishness. Michael Griffin places Goldsmith in two contexts: one is the intellectual and political culture in which he worked as a professional author living in London; the other is that of his nationality and his as yet unstudied Jacobite politics. Enlightenment in Ruins thereby reveals a body of work that is compellingly marked by tensions and transits between Irishness and Englishness, between poetic and professional imperatives, and between cultural and scientific spheres.

A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature undertakes a comprehensive ecocritical examination of the region's literature from the foundational texts of the nineteenth century to the most recent fiction. The book begins with a consideration of the way in which Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's views of nature through the lens of the categories of ';civilization' and ';barbarity' from Facundo (1845) are systematically challenged and revised in the rest of the century. Subsequently, this book develops the argument that a vital part of the cultural critique and aesthetic innovations of Spanish American modernismo involve an ecological challenge to deepening discourses of untamed development from Europe and the United States. In other chapters, many of the well-established titles of regional and indigenista literature are contrasted to counter-traditions within those genres that express aspects of environmental justice, ';deep ecology,' the relational role of emotion in nature protectionism and conservationism, even the rights of non-human nature. Finally, the concluding chapters find that the articulation of ecological advocacy in recent fiction is both more explicit than what came before but also impacts the formal elements of literature in unique ways. Textual conventions such as language, imagery, focalization, narrative sequence, metafiction, satire, and parody represent innovations of form that proceed directly from the ethical advocacy of environmentalism. The book concludes with comments about what must follow as a result of the analysis including the revision of canon, the development of literary criticism from novel approaches such as critical animal studies, and the advent of a critical dialogue within the bounds of Spanish American environmentalist literature.A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature attempts to develop a sense of the way in which ecological ideas have developed over time in the literature, particularly the way in which many Spanish American texts anticipate several of the ecological discourses that have recently become so central to global culture, current environmentalist thought, and the future of humankind.

Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics, 18001830: Romantic Crises is a study of the political lives of William Wordsworth and Felicia Hemans between 1800 and 1830. Tracing trajectories from the first decade of the nineteenth century to the meeting of the two authors in 1830, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics argues that the dominant paradigm for their political thought was that of ';crisis.' Obsessed with the mysterious connections between the individual, the home, and the state, Wordsworth and Hemans portrayed all three in a common crisis that would be resolved in the future. Both writers articulated historical moments when the tenuousness of the present society gave glimpses into a future one. Building on and reacting to the strong critical statements of the 80s and 90s that tended to see the political views of Wordsworth and Hemans as formed by personal crises, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics argues that far from being tied to personal circumstances, crises were staged by Wordsworth and Hemans to argue for clear political positions on a wide variety of topics. Because crises come with claims of singularity, the use of crises to explain historical change finds its origin in revolutionary ideology. But because imagined crises proliferated throughout the Romantic period, crises no longer signaled earth-shattering change, but business as usual. The ideology of crises carried the tension between revolution and modernity that haunted the Romantic period. Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics presents revisionary readings of major works and contributes to long-standing discussions on a number of different topics: dissenting politics, poor relief, gender roles in peace and wartime, and the nature of historical memory, to name a few. By focusing on the dramatic nature of crisis narratives, Wordsworth, Hemans, and Politics responds to master narratives of the Romantic period that limit and simplify political expression. The book restores complexity to the political lives of two poets who fashioned revolutionary ideology for their own ends.

Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia examines masterpieces of early modern English and Spanish theater with attention to issues of transculturation, translation, interpretation and performance. This collection of essays by highly respected British and American scholars and theater practitioners offers a unique transnational view of two great dramatic traditions in the social contexts in which they were originally created and in which they are presently viewed.

Antonio Lopez Garca's Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting is the first book to give the famed Spanish artist the critical attention he deserves. Born in Tomelloso in 1936 and still living in the Spanish capital today, Antonio Lopez has long cultivated a reputation for impressive urban scenesbut it is urban time that is his real subject.Going far beyond mere artist biography, Benjamin Fraser explores the relevance of multiple disciplines to an understanding of the painter's large-scale canvasses. Weaving selected images together with their urban referentsand without ever straying too far from discussion of the painter's oeuvre, method and reception by criticsFraser pulls from disciplines as varied as philosophy, history, Spanish literature and film, cultural studies, urban geography, architecture, and city planning in his analyses.The book begins at ground level with one of the artist's most recognizable images, the Gran Va, which captures the urban project that sought to establish Madrid as an emblem of modernity. Here, discussion of the artist's chosen painting styleone that has been referred to as a ';hyperrealism'is integrated with the central street's history, the capital's famous literary figures, and its filmic representations, setting up the philosophical perspective toward which the book gradually develops.Chapter two rises in altitude to focus on Madrid desde Torres Blancas, an urban image painted from the vantage point provided by an iconic high-rise in the north-central area of the city. Discussion of the Spanish capital's northward expansion complements a broad view of the artist's push into representations of landscape and allows for the exploration of themes such as political conflict, social inequality, and the accelerated cultural change of an increasingly mobile nation during the 1960s.Chapter three views Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas and signals a turn toward political philosophy. Here, the size of the artist's image itself foregrounds questions of scale, which Fraser paints in broad strokes as he blends discussions of artistry with the turbulent history of one of Madrid's outlying districts and a continued focus on urban development and its literary and filmic resonance.Antonio Lopez Garca's Everyday Urban Worlds also includes an artist timeline, a concise introduction and an epilogue centering on the artist's role in the Spanish film El sol del membrillo. The book's clear style and comprehensive endnotes make it appropriate for both general readers and specialists alike.

Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones is the first full-length account of Ricardo Palma informed by theories of cultural criticism. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela sheds new light on important aspects of Palma's work. She offers a fresh interpretation of the relations between history and literature perhaps the most discussed aspect of Palma's work engaging with new critical thinking on historicism and examining the significance of the marginal and the anecdotal in Palma's work. By using the tools of postcolonial cultural criticism, Vera Tudela considers Palma's encounter with modernity, arguing that his recuperation of colonial history plays a crucial part in imagining the modern future. Most innovatively, Vera Tudela examines the multiple and contradictory notions of femininity in nineteenth-century Latin America and in Palma's writing, showing how a historical consideration of the sexual politics of cultural production transforms our understanding of many of the assumptions about this period. Finally, by applying the insights of cultural geography in analysing the racial, sexual and political identity of domestic, urban and national space in Palma's writing, Vera Tudela demonstrates that Palma's literary maps and topographies are uniquely revelatory of questions of power and agency. In its exploration of sexual politics and nationhood, Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones presents Palma as a proto-modernist who paved the way for many of the experiments of twentieth-century Latin American narrative fiction.