Upon the release of her new book Satire, Celebrity, & Politics in Jane Austen (Bucknell University Press, 2017), Jocelyn Harris was kind enough to discuss her research and writing on the witty English novelist.  Jane Austen has been the subject for much of Harris’ work, and still is, as Harris continues to uncover new insights into Austen’s life and writing. As Harris puts it, Austen is “quite simply inexhaustible”—and as Harris’ responses demonstrate, new methods of research and deeper investigation reveal more about her with each new endeavor.

Bucknell University Press: You state in your introduction that you “reconstruct Jane Austen’s creative process by means of the newspapers she perused, the gossip she heard, the streets she walked upon, and the sights she saw.”  This method suggests a focus on environment, an almost anthropological study of a different time and place.  What was the research process like in regards to uncovering evidence from the past?  What challenges did you meet?  What was the most rewarding?

Jocelyn Harris: Distance is my biggest challenge, because I live in New Zealand, half a world away from the great libraries of Europe and North America. The Internet has quite simply changed my life. Exciting new resources such as databases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century newspapers, digitized manuscripts, online books, blogs, and search engines all open up cultural and historical contexts that bring her back to life—as do new books and editions in print and e-book form, readily accessible articles on the web, and email suggestions from friends.

Reading the magnificent modern editions of Fanny Burney’s letters and journals made me aware that snippets of her correspondence, obviously too good to ignore, reappear in Austen’s novels. My guess is that her mother’s gossipy cousin, who lived over the road from the celebrated author, could have told the family many a sensational tale of Burney’s life at the court of George III.

With the help of the Internet, I realized that Austen probably based Elizabeth and Jane Bennet on two royal mistresses. Dorothy Jordan, celebrity actress, mistress to the Duke of Clarence, and mother of his ten children, seems to have inspired her creation of the lively Elizabeth, while Austen would identify a portrait of the regent’s mistress, Mrs. Georgina Quentin, as Mrs. Bingley. When the regent came courting this “professed spanker,” Georgina was living in Covent Garden, where Austen stayed with her banker brother, Henry.

Most of Jane Austen’s correspondence has been lost, and she kept no diary. Therefore, I had to fill out her life by poring over her locations, her reading, her social and literary networks, her knowledge of current events, and her viewing of cartoons and portraits.

While she is immortalized by her writing, Austen was a real person living during a unique moment in history.  In your opinion, what is the most compelling piece of information that you learned about Jane Austen during the research process for this book?

Austen is often regarded as a gentle, amusing ironist. But as the title of Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen indicates, I believe that she was a courageous political satirist.  At a time when the cult of celebrity was in its infancy, she targeted celebrities, up to and including the Prince of Wales. Her in-jokes about public figures demonstrate her worldliness, her fascination with fame, and her relish of rumor.

She was also never more than one degree of separation away from royalty. To know from a local historian’s website that the young Prince of Wales lived near Steventon, Austen’s home, was to understand why she created so many satiric avatars of him.  Austen was a patriot, and the prince was endangering the nation. She attacked him in the only way she could, obliquely, through her characters and plots. In Northanger Abbey, for instance, the unlovely John Thorpe lies, boasts, swears, looks, and behaves as badly as Prince George. A “stout young man of middling height,” with a “plain face and ungraceful form,” Thorpe utters “a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every woman they met.”

Austen attacks the prince yet again in Mansfield Park’s Henry Crawford, a man marked like him by caprice and unsteadiness. Crawford indulges in the “freaks of a cold-blooded vanity,” and rids himself of his money and leisure “at the idlest haunts in the kingdom.” In Persuasion, she criticizes Sir Walter Elliot’s status and power, as unearned as the regent’s, and praises Captain Wentworth’s merit and courage. Austen’s lacerating portraits suggest first-hand knowledge of the prince’s vulgar, voyeuristic, and self-indulgent ways.

Considering again the study of place, if Austen had lived during this day and age, who do you think her subjects for inspiration might have been?  How do you think the world would have reacted to her wit, humor, and criticism?

A Regency woman in a golden age of satire, Austen attacked the Prince of Wales for his much-lampooned appearance, his lewdness, his vanity, his instability, his outrageous spending, his tremendous debts, his desire for absolute power, his implicit treason, his fondness for over-the-top building ventures, and his embarrassing braggadocio. Even court insiders warned that the prince was not fit to be king, and Austen wrote that she hated him. The current resurgence of political satire in social media, newspapers, and cartoons would have delighted this savvy, progressive, and thoroughly modern woman.

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics being your third book on Jane Austen, how has your research evolved regarding your interest in her life and writing? Are there any questions that still need to be answered? What will you do next?

I only want to know how Jane Austen did it (only!). In Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1989), I followed the turns of her mind as she picked up elements from other writers and made them into her own. Undeterred by being a woman, she took whatever she wanted from anywhere.

In A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” (University of Delaware Press, 2007), I traced her creative process in the only manuscript to survive from her published novels. In the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, she deletes, interlineates, writes new material in the margins, and sticks on a scrap with a wax wafer. Eight days later, she threw all that away, and wrote some of the most remarkable scenes in her work––the last chapters of Persuasion.  She was indeed a true professional.

At a time of hardship, inequality, and war, Austen wrote, “How much are the Poor to be pitied, and the Rich to be blamed.” In Persuasion, she attacks the class hierarchies propping up the society of her day. In a highly subversive move, she sets Sir Walter Elliot’s Baronetage against Captain Wentworth’s Navy List, pride of birth against pride of accomplishment. The aging patriarch of the Elliots cannot compete with the glamorous young Captain Wentworth, who derives from real-life heroes such as Lord Nelson, Lord Byron, and Captain Cook. So too, in this brave new world of energy and achievement, the faded beauty of Bath gives way to the Romantic sublimity of Lyme Regis. In this eloquent novel about second chances, Anne Elliot finds a fragile happiness.

Jane Austen is quite simply inexhaustible. I’m writing about her relationship to Madame de Staël, the foremost woman genius of the age; the London locations where she could have seen contemporary cartoons; and her continual fascination with Fanny Burney. There is always more to find out about this extraordinary woman.

For more information on Austen, take a look at Harris’ latest book Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen. To order visit www.rowman.com or call 1-800-462-6420. Use code “UP30AUTH17” to save 30% on the list price (not valid on eBook).

 

Bucknell University Press: You’ve known most of your life that your father was both a brilliant painter and a hoarder. Did you plan to write this memoir even before your father died?

Sascha Feinstein: I didn’t seriously consider Wreckage as a book project until after he died, when I started clearing the land and buildings on Cape Cod (and, to a lesser extent, the house in Philadelphia). I also couldn’t write quickly because so much had to be unearthed for me to understand both the process of renovation and the artifacts themselves, and that took years. I’m still finding buried objects! But the majority of the labor and writing took place within the first ten years of his death [2003 – 2013].

As a writer, I’m most interested when polarities flourish simultaneously. And I had to get physically involved in the wreckage in order to speak about the disastrous rot and decay taking place in these locations of extraordinary creativity. When you braid that kind of double helix, art will emerge beyond the confines of anecdotes.

Did you find the book cathartic?

I’m frequently asked that question, and I still don’t have a slick answer! The process of saving the Cape property—which involved, among other things, the removal of over 30 tons of refuse—certainly liberated the residence itself, as did the extermination of monstrous poison ivy vines and tenacious bamboo. The making of the book (as with the making of anything creative) certainly made me feel alive as an artist. But in terms of catharsis, I would have to say that, yes, telling the stories and illuminating scores of people who thought they knew the totality of his character became a great emotional release.

He had a terribly controlling nature, so he swiftly attacked any challenge with vitriolic contempt. I never had, nor could I have had, an honest conversation with him about his hoarding. Art, yes, but nothing negative, nothing that might challenge his maniacal machismo. So I’ve finally had my day in court, so to speak.

You’ve described your writing style as “collage-like.” Why did you decide to create that kind of structure as opposed to a more standard, chronological narrative?

I tend not to view time in a linear way, and I’m much less interested in chronology than I am theme and metaphor. I want each chapter/essay to be an emotional journey, one governed by theme as opposed to time. (In that sense, I see strong parallels between my poetry and my prose.) Ideally, I’d like the reader not merely to remember specific stories but to return to chapters and revisit connective imagery. It demands much more of the reader, of course, but I hope the effort is worth the personal engagement.

I also wanted this form because it’s similar to the kinds of paintings that my father nurtured in his painting classes. He created immense still lifes out of broken and abandoned objects; from these, the students needed to find patterns and transitional colors in order to make the paintings achieve balanced movement and tone—to make them swing and evoke strong emotion.

I say “emotion” rather than “meaning” because we tend to associate “meaning” with narrative; these works were obviously nonrepresentational. If you look at the still life on the cover of the book, for example, you’ll find a tree trunk (still sprouting) holding an elongated, cracked vase of sorts, onto which my father attached a broken tea pot. This has no narrative meaning, but structurally—when we remove the associations of “tea pot” and “tree trunk”—they create interesting forms, echoed in their ringed movements by other objects in the still life. It was the artists’ challenge to transform the canvas into a cohesive, rhythmic statement, much like a writer linking themes and metaphors. So I think there’s a direct corollary to the chapters in Wreckage, where I take myriad sources to generate thematic coherence. (I originally called Selected Sources a “still life of sources,” but that was eventually changed by the editors.)

When it came to understanding and creating art, your father had the highest standards, and yet he seemed to collect junk not necessarily for aesthetic reasons, or even for specific projects, but almost arbitrarily. Is that fair to say?

Absolutely. He rarely collected junk with the thought of building something specific out it, like Simon Rodia and the construction of Watts Towers. Some exceptions on the Cape property included a large creature that he called The Monster and a large stone table. But most of what he hoarded simply disappeared over the years: rotting lumber, bags of Salvation Army clothing, file cabinets filled with ripped-out magazine articles, buckets of rusted nails, car hoods, tree trunks, hardened cement, you name it. Over the years, of course, the new still lifes would eclipse old ones, and the teaching locations lost workable space the way vines choke out landscapes. (This is partly why the first chapter is called “Wisteria.”) But you’re absolutely right: He didn’t really prize the junk he found; he merely wanted things because someday they might be used, either practically or artistically.

Given the extent of his collecting, how visible were his paintings in the house?

For a person whose life centered around art, it’s somewhat shocking to think how few paintings actually hung on walls. One exception would be Summer, which I mention several times in Wreckage, including a charming story of a woman visiting the U.S. from Russia who practically collapsed from sensory overload. “The sky, the sea,” she said. “I’m staying.”

The rebuilt Cape house, and my other Pennsylvania home, present the opposite aesthetic: Most walls feature work by my parents. (My mother was a painter, weaver, and textile designer.) I have more art than I can hang—but that’s a lovely problem.

Does this mean you don’t plan to collect lots of junk as you get older?

Absolutely not! One thing that the experience taught me was how much I don’t want to leave behind for our children. In fairness, I am a collector (mainly of music and books), but the difference between being a collector and a hoarder is pretty vast. At least I hope so.

And I have no regrets that I threw out so many tons of refuse. My father’s legacy should be art, not junk, and when I look at his glorious canvases, I forget the tremendous effort that took place in order to show them.

*Save 30% on this book with code 8S17BUP order here

 

When the Bucknell University Press released an announcement for a book collecting contest, we received a response from ‘77 alumnus—Roland Ochsenbein. Though the contest was directed towards current students, Mr. Ochsenbein had an interesting collection to share—a library library. With a degree in English and being editor-in-chief of the Bucknellian his senior year, Mr. Ochsenbein moved on to become involved in the publishing field, his interests revolving around books and good writing.
In 2001, he was asked to take on a leadership position in the expansion and renovation of a tiny historic public library in his small hometown of Bolton, MA.

“It was the kind of civic effort that appealed to me. The expansion project turned out to be a significant nine-year endeavor that required our community to debate not only the value we place on library services, but also what we envision as a library for the next 100 years. Thanks to the work of many–and especially our steadfast library director–the project was a great success in the end.”

This endeavor led Mr. Ochsenbein to a seat on the State Advisory Committee on Libraries and then to a gubernatorial appointment to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. At the same time, he was also working as a consultant for publishing companies in facing the challenges of digital transformation. He even contributed partly to the prototype website for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which launched in 2013 and went on to be named one of the 50 best websites of that year by Time Magazine. As his volunteer and professional life came together, Mr. Ochsenbein realized that a collection was forming out of the several books he had acquired over the years about libraries.

“I have been thinking a lot about how public libraries (physical and digital) are changing, and how publishing and reading and learning and literacy are all changing.”

And so, with these interests, his collection began to grow. At this time, there are roughly 50 volumes in his collection, though it is still expanding and has recently begun to include the “capture of blog postings, online essays and other digital forms of communication related to this interest area.” While he is broadening to include digital media, Mr. Ochsenbein reveals that his favorite in the collection is a book titled Reading Rooms, edited by Susan Allen Toth and John Coughlan.

“This book is a compilation of essays, stories and poems by well-known writers, all in celebration of our nation’s public libraries. Writers such as Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, E.B. White, Amy Tan, Stephen King and Philip Roth (Bucknell ’54) talk about how the public library, be it a single room in a rural community or an imposing city edifice, has helped influence and enrich lives. I relate to this because I too was influenced and enriched by having access to wonderful local libraries (and librarians!) during my formative years. I feel the same kind of appreciation that is expressed in this book, and that is what ultimately has motivated me to volunteer and work with libraries over the years.”

Public libraries in particular, have attracted Mr. Ochsenbein’s interest:

“The historian David McCullough once wrote: I believe that public libraries are among—if not the—most important, most marvelous of all of our American institutions. I share that sentiment completely. Public libraries have the capacity to enrich communities and individuals to a degree that no other public institution can. A good public library is a social, cultural and intellectual cornerstone to any community. And it provides access and opportunity for all.”

Mr. Ochsenbein’s library library is unique to be sure, driven by an admirable fascination with the gem that is the public library. He one day hopes to write about some of his experiences with libraries, either in article, essay, or book form. “Assembling this small working research library about libraries” he claims “is one of the preparatory steps in that effort.” Perhaps one day he will be able to add a work of his own to the growing library of libraries!

 

-Alana Jajko, 2014-15 Cynthia Fell Intern

Every year since 1987, the month of March has been designated as National Women’s History Month.  The campaign that pushed this declaration of Congress was led by the National Women’s History Project, an organization founded in Santa Rosa, California by a group of women driven to broadcast women’s historical achievements.  As their motto has become “Writing Women Back into History,” I thought I would search our database to see what kinds of writings have been inspired by women in our own collection.  In fact, it was hard to narrow down.  The subjects revolving around women were many and varied, all so different and intriguing in their own ways.  In the end, it came down to these…

Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850-1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun (2013)

By Jennifer Jenkins Wood

Between 1850 and 1920 women’s travel and travel writing underwent an explosion. It was an exciting period in the history of travel, a golden age. While transportation had improved, mass tourism had not yet robbed journeys of their aura of adventure. Although British women were at the forefront of this movement, a number of intrepid Spanish women also participated in this new era of travel and travel writing. They transcended general societal limitations imposed on Spanish women at a time when the refrain “la mujer en casa, y con la pata quebrada” described most of their female compatriots, who suffered from legal constraints, lack of education, a husband’s dictates, or little or no money of their own.  Spanish Women Travelers at Home and Abroad, 1850 – 1920: From Tierra del Fuego to the Land of the Midnight Sun analyzes the travels and the travel writings of eleven extraordinary women: Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos (pseud. Colombine), Rosario de Acuña, Carolina Coronado, Emilia Serrano (Baronesa de Wilson), Eva Canel, Cecilia Böhl de Faber (pseud. Fernán Caballero), Princesses Paz and Eulalia de Borbón, Sofía Casanova, and Mother María de Jesús Güell. These Spanish women travelers climbed mountain peaks in their native country, traveled by horseback in the Amazon, observed the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, suffered from el soroche [altitude sickness] in the Andes, admired the midnight sun in Norway, traveled to mission fields in sub-Saharan Africa, and reported on wars in Europe and North Africa, to mention only a few of their accomplishments. The goal of this study is to acquaint English-speaking readers with the narratives of these remarkable women whose works are not available in translation. Besides analyzing their travel narratives and the role of travel in their lives, Spanish Women Travelers includes many long excerpts translated into English for the first time.

This book revolves around women who lived for adventure, who put themselves out into the world to experience all that it has to offer, and then wrote about it in ways of their own.  It is a fascinating study of women and how this writing genre spanned across cultures to encompass the interest of many, highlighting those stories that may have been overlooked because of language barriers.   A writing of women adventurers back into history!

Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women’s Desire, Deception, and Agency (2013)

By Peggy Thompson

Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedies. Plays by George Etherege, William Wycherley, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, William Congreve, Catharine Trotter, Thomas Southerne, John Vanbrugh, and Mary Pix—as well as much modern scholarship about them—taint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become “women” by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it. Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it intersects with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

Coyness and Crime revolves around a time when women were written into history through theatre, but in a negative way, dominated by masculine control.  Thompson studies this genre to uncover the reasons behind this injustice and to write women back into history without the bias of the time in which Restoration comedy was being produced.

Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (2013)

By Deborah Kennedy

In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of “A Nocturnal Reverie,” provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.

This work provides the stories of five women writers and how their works have had an effect on the course of literary history.  It is a study that writes women back into a specific genre of poetic history.

Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830 (2014)

Edited by Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr

Stage Mothers explores the connections between motherhood and the theater both on and off stage throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the realities of eighteenth-century motherhood and representations of maternity have recently been investigated in relation to the novel, social history, and political economy, the idea of motherhood and its connection to the theatre as a professional, material, literary, and cultural site has received little critical attention. The essays in this volume, spanning the period from the Restoration to Regency, address these forgotten maternal narratives, focusing on: the representation of motherhood as the defining female role; the interplay between an actress’s celebrity persona and her chosen roles; the performative balance between the cults of maternity and that of the “passionate” actress; and tensions between sex and maternity and/or maternity and public authority. In examining the overlaps and disconnections between representations and realities of maternity in the long eighteenth century, and by looking at written, received, visual, and performed records of motherhood, Stage Mothers makes an important contribution to debates central to eighteenth-century cultural history.

Each of these works contributes to a recognition of women’s endeavors and representations over the course of history.  They all resonate with the mission of the National Women’s History Project, to write women back into history, and also span a variety of complex topics from travel to poetry to theater.  Every year, the National Women’s History Project selects a unifying theme to be shared with all who want to promote women’s history, and the variety of books in this selection certainly adheres to the theme for 2015: “Weaving the Stories of Women’s Lives.”

 

-Alana Jajko, 2014-15 Cynthia Fell Intern

 

Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhuit! (lah leh PAH-drig SUN-uh gwitch!)  Happy Saint Patrick’s Day to you!  During this day of festivities—public parades, wearing of green attire and shamrocks, feasting, and music—March 17^th annually marks the celebration of the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick.  He was a Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland in the 5^th century, and though this date marks the day of his death, it is a celebration of his life and of Ireland itself.  Saint Patrick’s Day is an ethnic and national holiday in Ireland, but is observed all over the world by the extended Irish and Catholic community.  In the spirit of the holiday, I went looking through our database for books that explore the history of Ireland as well as its culture today.  Anglo-Irish Identities serves as a collection of essays that studies the history leading to the identity of early modern Ireland, and then two books from our Contemporary Irish Writers series, Medbh McGuckian and Eavan Boland, lean towards a study of the works of two writers existing in Ireland today.

Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571-1845

Edited by David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury (2008)

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as “other” both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland, the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature.

Eavan Boland

Jody Allen Randolph (2013)

Contemporary Irish Writers

In this powerful and authoritative study Jody Allen Randolph provides the fullest account yet of the work of a major figure in twentieth-century Irish literature as well as in contemporary women’s writing. Eavan Boland’s achievement in changing the map of Irish poetry is tracked and analyzed from her first poems to the present. The book traces the evolution of that achievement, guiding the reader through Boland’s early attachment to Yeats, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich, and her eventual, challenging amendments in poetry and prose to Ireland’s poetic tradition. Using research from private papers the book also traces a time of upheaval and change in Ireland, exploring Boland’s connection to Mary Robinson, in a chapter that details the nexus of a woman president and a woman poet in a country that was resistant to both. Finally, this book invites the reader to share a compelling perspective on the growth of a poet described by one critic as Ireland’s “first great woman poet.”

Medbh McGuckian

Borbála Faragó (2014)

Contemporary Irish Writers

This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the entire corpus of Medbh McGuckian’s published work. Its objective is to provide both a readable synthesis of existing criticism, in a fashion which will be generally useful to academics and students, and also to offer an original contribution to the field of contemporary Irish literary studies on the basis of new research. The book investigates a variety of previously neglected themes, in particular McGuckian’s exploration of ideas of creativity and performativity in her poetry.

Over the past two decades McGuckian has been recognized by both her fellow poets and by literary critics as one of the most original, daring and important poetic voices in contemporary Ireland. Since 1982 she has published fifteen volumes of poetry, extraordinary not merely for its sustained quality and linguistic and technical virtuosity, but also for its constant evolution and reinvention. This book provides an original perspective on her work both thematically and methodologically. From a thematic perspective, the process of artistic creation is a key preoccupation of McGuckian’s poetry which recurs in every volume of her oeuvre but has previously escaped critical attention. By adapting and refining theories of singularity and creativity, the book allows for a coherent analysis of this central aspect of McGuckian’s work. Methodologically it differs from previous studies in the scope of its approach. Uniquely, it pursues its investigation across the entire breadth of the poet’s published output and emphasizes the thematic unity of individual volumes in the light of the poet’s constant change and development. Throughout the book, the reading of McGuckian’s work concentrates on poems in their entirety, an approach which has not figured to any notable degree in the existing secondary literature on the poet, not least because of the perceived difficulty of her writing. A critical investigation, however, which respects both the integrity of the individual poems and the internal coherence of her various volumes allows for a far deeper understanding both of the poet’s thematic preoccupations and of the evolution of her distinctive poetic voice.

***

In this collection of books we see a greater range of Ireland, from its historical struggles in Anglo-Irish Identities to how those identities have resulted and inspired writers in Ireland today like Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian.  Even the covers of these books reflect Irish identity, the cover art having been created by Irish artist Gráinne Dowling, her muses coming mostly from the landscape of Ireland itself.  As you enjoy the festivities and traditions of Saint Patrick’s Day, I leave you with an old Irish blessing: “May you escape the gallows, avoid distress, and be as healthy as a trout!”

 

To read more about the origins of the Contemporary Irish Writers series:

http://upress.blogs.bucknell.edu/2014/01/14/art-and-inspiration-in-contemporary-irish-writers/

To learn more about the inspirations of artist Gráinne Dowling:

http://upress.blogs.bucknell.edu/2014/11/06/an-interview-with-artist-grainne-dowling/

 

–Alana Jajko, 2014-15 Cynthia Fell Intern

 

 

 

As February, the month of love, comes to a close, I thought it appropriate to reflect on another commemoration for which it is known.   Since 1976, the month of February has been designated by every U.S. President as Black History Month.  It coincides with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, as well as the founding of the NAACP on February 12, 1909.  Lincoln and Douglas were both prominent abolitionists—Douglas an escaped slave as well as strong author, orator, and activist for anti-slavery during the 1800s, and Lincoln abolishing slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.  But this month celebrates more than just the extinction of slavery.  It is a recognition of all of Black History’s significant moments, leaders, activists, and cultural identities as well.

The Griot Project Book Series here at Bucknell University Press also seeks to celebrate African American culture, exploring the aesthetic, artistic and cultural products and intellectual currents of historical and contemporary African America and of the African diaspora.  Our newest additions to the series in our partnership with the Griot Institute for Africana Studies are James Braxton Peterson’s In Media Res: Race, Identity and Pop Culture in the 21^st Century and Angèle Kingué’s Venus of Khala-Kanti.

 

In Media Res, edited by James Peterson, is a manifold collection that reflects the intersectional qualities of university programming in the twenty-first century. Taking race, gender, and popular culture as its central thematic subjects, the volume collects academic essays, speeches, poems, and creative works that critically engage a wide range of issues, including American imperialism, racial and gender discrimination, the globalization of culture, and the limitations of our new multimedia world. This diverse assortment of works by scholars, activists, and artists models the complex ways that we must engage university students, faculty, staff, and administration in a moment where so many of us are confounded by the “in medias res” nature of our interface with the world in the current moment. Featuring contributions from Imani Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Suheir Hammad, John Jennings, and Adam Mansbach, In Media Res is a primer for academic inquiry into popular culture; American studies; critical media literacy; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and Africana studies.

 

Venus of Khala-Kanti is a tale of life-altering loss and mystical recovery. Set in an imaginary West African village that becomes a charming cul-de-sac, the unintended consequence of a national roadwork project gone awry, the story follows characters drawn with humor, irony, and empathy. The heart of the story beats with the laughter and tears of three women. Having faced incredible hardship, they come together to build their lives anew, armed with the age-old spirit of human resilience, understanding, and tenderness. Tapping into the very soil of Khala-Kanti, Bella, Assumta, and Clarisse construct spaces, both internal and external, where they and others can rejuvenate their bodies, minds, and spirits. They build the Good Hope Center, which embraces both the physical and the mystical landscape of the story. The Center fuels the restoration and growth of the village’s inhabitants, and offers sanctuary for those who visit and those who stay.

So as the month of love comes to a close, think about its significance as Black History Month too!  Expand that love to engulf the dynamic past and rich culture of the African American.  Happy February!  Happy Black History Month!

 

Learn more about the Griot Project Book Series here: http://www.bucknell.edu/script/upress/series.asp?id=55

–Alana Jajko, 2014-15 Cynthia Fell Intern