A Year in Reviews

Before we ring in 2021, Bucknell University Press would like to take a moment to celebrate the awards and reviews our books and authors earned in 2020 and recognize their impact on scholarship around the world.

Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing

Avenues of Translation

Avenues of Translation edited by Regina Galasso and Evelyn Scaramella won the 2020 SAMLA Studies Book Award — Edited Collection. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city’s past and present literary and cultural practices.

Reading Homer’s Odyssey

Reading Homer’s Odyssey

Reading Homer’s Odyssey by Kostas Myrsiades was named a finalist in the 2020 PROSE Awards, Classics Section. Reading Homer’s Odyssey offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist and engages the seasoned reader in new perspectives.

Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Novel Bodies by Jason S. Farr earned several positive reviews throughout the year.

“Farr’s framework, which further upholds form, content, and eighteenth-century social justice assuredly feels like one trajectory forward. In short, for those looking for a model in how to do intersectional work well in the eighteenth century, Novel Bodies fits the bill.”
Studies in the Novel

Novel Bodies

Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature inhabits the fascinating messiness of Georgian-era literary imaginings of corporeal and sexual difference in order to better historicize disability’s formative role in the development of the modern self and its queer relationship to able-bodiedness.”
Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Novel Bodies raises an important intersection that clearly needs more careful attention from our scholarly community: race, sexuality, and disability….Novel Bodies succeeds in the story it wants to tell….By attending to representations of corporealities and sexualities that seem liberating, oppressive, recuperative, and resistant, Farr renders the genealogy of sex and disability in a way that challenges those consequences of the Enlightenment that we are still wrestling with today.”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Novel Bodies makes a thrilling foray into a number of critical conversations. Its readability reflects Farr’s careful articulation of the relation of each chapter to the others and to his primary argument. Scholars of British literature will benefit from Novel Bodies‘ new perspective on several canonical authors, while scholars of American literature might turn to it to consider how the representations of, and responses to, disability and queerness on which it focuses might have crossed the Atlantic, where many of these works were being read and discussed.”
Eighteenth Century Studies

Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature

Woven Shades of Green

Literary Hub included Timothy Wenzell’s Woven Shades of Green in their spring roundup of “The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News.” The book was also reviewed in the Irish Studies Review.

“Readers familiar with Irish literature and ecocriticism will find this volume filled with familiar faces and materials, as well as a few more obscure and exciting ones. This anthology offers scholars a series of substantial pieces from which to expand and further consider Irish nature writing and Irish approaches to the natural world.”
Irish Studies Review

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto earned a spot in Literary Hub‘s “The Best of the University Presses: 100 Books to Escape the News.” 

“Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light; Bona Mbella is the second.”
Literary Hub

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Times Literary Supplement reviewed The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe edited by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhornon.

“This book does all that you could ask of a thoroughly scholarly work, but won’t deter any enquirer; its introduction is thorough, judicious and wise, its bibliographical apparatus refrains from crowding the story and authentic illustrations are expertly annotated. Crisp footnotes, on the right page, are thorough, responsible and concise.”
Times Literary Supplement

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building

The German journal MEDIENwissenschaft Rezensionen reviewed Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building by Naida Garcia Crespo in the latest 2020 issue.

“García-Crespo’s professional, methodical approach is particularly to be emphasized….[A]n in-depth history of the film’s beginnings in Puerto Rico.”
MEDIENwissenschaft Rezensionen

The Memory Sessions

Suzanne Farrell Smith, author of The Memory Sessions, was featured in an interview “Writing Small Moments: A Conversation with Suzanne Farrell Smith” on The Rumpus.

The Memory Sessions

“One of my motivations for writing [The Memory Sessions] is to encourage readers to interrogate their own memories and to not be afraid to do that, and to do it in a way that gives themselves permission to be wrong about the memory. I think there is a door that opens in the mind to a whole lot of other discoveries. I think the moment we label our memories as wrong or bad, the door just never opens. It’s shut. I think that by walking through that door, you then find other doors, and then you get exposed to all the other stories out there. What I mean by that is, by spending all of this time interrogating my own memory, I was able to interrogate my sisters’ memories and come to this much more gracious understanding of the things they’re carrying, too.” -Suzanne Farrell Smith, in The Rumpus

Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gaurds

Beyond Human

Tara Daly’s Beyond Human was reviewed in The Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Hispanic Review.

“From the pedagogical perspective, Beyond Human is teachable in its entirety in a course on Latin-American Vanguards or on the cultural production in the Andean region. The chapters can also be used as stand-alone material on the five intellectuals discussed in the book.”
The Bulletin of Spanish Studies

Beyond Human offers an important reading that adds to ongoing discussions of new materialism….[A] very interesting book that proposes a fresh reading of materiality in the Andes.”
Hispanic Review

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change

The Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Hispania reviewed Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change, edited by Jennifer Smith.

“Jennifer Smith continues to vindicate the validity of feminism today. There is no doubt that Maryellen Bieder would be proud of the legacy passed on to her numerous disciples and colleagues.”
The Bulletin of Spanish Studies

“An outstanding contribution of cutting-edge research to students and scholars of feminist discourses, gender studies, and modern Peninsular literatures and cultures.”
Hispania

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives

Science Fiction Studies included a review of Transmedia Creatures edited by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio.

“In Transmedia Creatures, Saggini and Soccio collect a truly international group of thirteen contributors who investigate the ways how Frankenstein adaptations traverse media, genre, and national boundaries….[T]his volume particularly appealing to instructors looking for innovation in teaching the novel.”
Science Fiction Studies

Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy

The July 2020 issue of Modern Language Review included a review of Pretexts for Writing by Seán M. Williams.

“This debut book, in short, contains much that is scintillant and surely announces the arrival of an important new scholarly voice in Germanistik.”
Modern Language Review

The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The Printed Reader

The Times Literary Supplement and the Journal of British Studies reviewed The Printed Reader by Amelia Dale.

“Dale conducts a subtle and interestingly circular argument about quixotism and gender….[A]n ingenious, energetic and polished book, which cleverly associates a number of current critical concerns.”
Times Literary Supplement

The Printed Reader is a brilliant contribution to the study of how eighteenth-century British writers understood Don Quixote and deployed quixotic parody in their works.”
Journal of British Studies

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750

The Spring 2020 issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies reviewed Cultivating Peace by Melissa Schoenberger.

Cultivating Peace is a fascinating book about Virgil’s didactic agricultural poem The Georgics and the poetry and political thinking that it inspired in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Melissa Schoenberger recovers, from Virgil’s poem, a distinctively georgic understanding of peace as mutable and contingent.”
Eighteenth Century Studies

Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle

The March 2020 issue of Choice reviewed Community and Solitude edited by Anthony W. Lee.

“The scholarship is of a consistently high level, and the prose is clear and well edited. Community and Solitude provides a salutary reminder that authorship is not always the solitary activity that many people assume. Recommend.”
Choice

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

The Russian Review reviewed Mikhail Bakhtin edited by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova in the January 2020 issue.

“While some readers may not relish working through the thicket of allusions and references that occasion these interviews, there are many rewards to be had for doing so, especially for intellectual historians of twentieth-century Russia, and for Bakhtin scholars everywhere. I recommend it highly.”
The Russian Review

To the Fairest Cape: European Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope

The annual 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Vol. 25) and the German journal Jahrbuch fűr Europäische Überseegeschichte reviewed The Fairest Cape by Malcom Jack.

“It is a beautifully produced book, well written and well illustrated with contemporary color plates. It will be most useful in the hands of a general reader wanting a general introduction to Cape travel writers.”
1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Vol. 25)

“This book is a gift for anyone who is interested in the people of the world living together. It is written in elegant prose and makes its concern pointedly clear. Apart from the people, it is the impressive landscape and nature of South Africa which fascinates the author and for which he finds heavenly words. It is essential to see these features of the overall picture because they gave the people living there for thousands of years a functioning place to live. The book points out strongly that the unity between people and the land was destroyed by the Europeans, but the author avoids any moral indignation and lets the facts alone speak for themselves. The reader who is less familiar with the history of South Africa feels at least at this point the wish to know the country more intensely.”
Jahrbuch fűr Europäische Überseegeschichte


For more information about any of these titles or other books and series published by Bucknell University Press, visit our 2020 catalog.