Bucknell University Press

In 2011, Barack Obama made a Presidential Proclamation that designated the month of June as National Caribbean American Heritage Month in the United States.  To commemorate this time when we celebrate the history and culture of Caribbean Americans, the Bucknell University Press is showcasing a few of our books that cover Caribbean topics.

Many of these selections are a part of our Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory series, edited by Anibal González, Professor of Spanish at Yale University. The aim of the series is to provide a forum for the best criticism on Latin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches, with an emphasis on works that productively combine scholarship with theory. We have also included a title from our general collection that covers national identities across the Americas, a memoir of Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré, and an edition of the Bucknell Review (1941-2004) that is is devoted to analyses of Caribbean cultural identities.

Celebrate the beginning of summer and National Caribbean American Heritage Month with the spirit of Caribbean culture captured in these books. Follow the links in the list below for more information on each title.

From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America (2016)
By Persephone Braham
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas (2016)
By Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta

Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative (2015)
By Jason Cortés
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Memoir (2015)
By Rosario Ferré
Translated by: Suzanne Hintz & Benigno Trigo

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (2013)
By Adriana Méndez Rodenas
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean Literature (2009)
By Julia Cuervo Hewitt
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean (2008)
By Dara Goldman
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Caribbean Cultural Identities (2001)
Edited by Glyne Griffith
Bucknell Review (44.2)

The Bucknell University Press Stories of the Susquehanna Valley series, edited by Katherine Faull and Alfred Siewers, has inspired a series of documentary projects funded by Bucknell, with one film produced by WVIA and several others produced by Bucknell students.  The book series itself seeks to develop interdisciplinary and multimedia approaches to the concept of region, place, and ethics in environmental studies. As Faull explains, “The Stories of the Susquehanna Book Series with the Bucknell University Press provides a traditional print format for scholarly research that focuses on the interconnectedness of people and place in the Susquehanna Watershed.”  While including a range of disciplines, from sciences and social sciences to literature and philosophy, the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley book series articulates narratives of an eco-region that played a formative, if often hidden, role in the early American republic, and which today provides potential models for more environmentally sustainable approaches to human community.  The editors of the series are also involved in the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley series of documentary projects.  According to Faull, “Where the documentary projects, both those that are student-produced and the WVIA-Bucknell collaborative undertakings, explore these stories in a public-facing genre, the book series attracts scholarship of the highest caliber on the Susquehanna that further informs and deepens the subject matter of the video productions.”

Faull was involved in the production of a film in the series entitled Peoples of the Susquehanna, which examines the history, culture, and traditions of the Native Americans of the river watershed.  The trailer can be viewed on pbs.org or the full film watched here with a WVIA Passport membership.  According to Siewers, “The recent WVIA-TV hour-length documentary Peoples of the Susquehanna was based on the first book in the [Bucknell University Press] series [Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley, Past and Present by David J. Minderhout] and connects with an upcoming volume.”  He explains, “The half-hour documentaries Utopian Dreams and Coopers and Conservation are likewise related to a planned volume.” Three of the documentaries are student-produced under Siewers’ guidance and are entitled Utopian Dreams, The Coopers and Conservation at the Headwaters of the Susquehanna, and The Churches of Coal Country.  The first in the series, Utopian Dreams, focuses on two 18th-century river communities and their diverging visions of society, and can be viewed for free on pbs.org.  The second film, The Coopers and Conservation at the Headwaters of the Susquehanna, examines the literary and conservation legacy of 19th-century authors James Fenimore Cooper and his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper. Key figures in American nature writing, the Coopers and their work helped to establish an early ethic of environmental stewardship at the Susquehanna River’s headwaters in Cooperstown, NY. This film has just been recently finished and is scheduled to broadcast on Thursday, May 31^st at 8pm with encores on Friday, June 1st at 2pm and Sunday, June 3rd at 1pm.  The Churches of Coal Country, the third in the student-produced series, is currently under production and will examine Slavic immigrant communities in Mount Carmel, PA.  It will cover similar themes found in another book from the series called Coal Dust on Your Feet: The Rise, Decline, and Restoration of an Anthracite Mining Town by Janet MacGaffey.

As Siewers explains, “Books and documentaries are two methods of exploring the region and highlighting its cultures in our series.”  Both Siewers and Faull are dedicated to highlighting the historical and cultural significance of the Susquehanna corridor.  According to Siewers, the book and documentary projects are focused on “developing digital story maps and other materials related to the rich landscape layers of culture and natural history in what some geologists consider to be America’s oldest river watershed.”  From books to films, the Stories of the Susquehanna Valley projects convey themes of interconnectedness across communities along the river and celebrate the shared environment through creative and informational perspectives.

Update: The Coopers and Conservation at the Headwaters of the Susquehanna can now be viewed online for free here.

Happy Birthday to Beverly Cleary! Author of the beloved Quimby sister stories, Cleary, born on April 12^th, 1916, celebrates her 102^nd birthday today! Inspired by her own experiences in the world around her, Cleary first started writing to create the books that she longed to read but could never find on library shelves. Most of her stories take place in the Grant Park neighborhood of northeast Portland, Oregon, where she was raised. Today she is a celebrated author of children’s and young adult fiction, with more than 90 million books sold worldwide since her first book, Henry Huggins, was published in 1950. Perhaps her most popular books revolve around the sisters Beezus and Ramona Quimby—the first, entitled Beezus and Ramona, published in 1955. Since then, the books have even inspired a movie adaption, Ramona and Beezus, released in 2010. More than half a century since the publication of Beverly Cleary’s first book, her stories remain popular with readers of all ages, passed down from generation to generation. Childhood favorites of my own experience were Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. First published in 1930, this too became a series to span generations. My own mother shared them with me, and from these books I learned to love reading. At age 102, I am sure that Beverly Cleary has provided that same experience for girls and boys alike whose parents became enchanted by Cleary’s charming humor and memorable characters.

http://www.beverlycleary.com/

Jocelyn Harris’ 2017 book with Bucknell University Press, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, has recently caught the attention of Times Literary Supplement (TLS). A special segment, entitled “What Jane Saw: Exploring Austen’s creative hinterland and recoverable influences,” features some of the highlights of Harris’ book and its contributions to Jane Austen scholarship. The article is written by Emma Clery, a specialist of the cultural history surrounding Jane Austen and Professor of English at the University of Southampton. In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics, Clery explains, Jocelyn Harris’ “expertise and questing curiosity are brought to bear on a set of themes that have not generally been associated with Austen.” She goes on to summarize Harris’ main points, giving readers of TLS a glimpse into the book which highlights Jane Austen’s position as a satirist, her character inspirations in the form of celebrities, and how these elements contributed to an underlying commentary on politics within Austen’s novels. While Harris explores these topics in Satire, Celebrity, and Politics, Clery also gives mention to her previous publications (Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion and A Revolution Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s “Persuasion”), all of which have made Harris “well established as a guide to the wider thought-world of the author.” To read the full article, see the February 9, 2018 edition of TLS, or subscribe to their database.

To order Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen visit www.rowman.com or call 1-800-462-6420.  Prices are $110 for cloth (978-1-61148-839-5) and $104 for eBook (978-1-61148-843-2).

When my advisor told me that I should look into the internship that had opened up with the Bucknell University Press, my first thought was: we have a press? It was the end of my Junior year at Bucknell, I was an English major, and yet I had never even heard of the Bucknell University Press. When I came into the Press for an interview, I found myself winding down a labyrinth of stairs and hallways into the basement of Bucknell’s Management building, Taylor Hall. Here, in this hobbit hole, was the Bucknell University Press. Upon my arrival, I was interviewed by the Press’s two and only regular employees—Pam Dailey and Greg Clingham. Besides an editorial board of about 11 other Bucknell faculty and staff (who meet with Pam and Greg four times per year), these two were the main forces behind press operations. As a Senior at Bucknell, I was to become a third hand, serving at the Press’s intern for the 2014-2015 academic year.

As I became acquainted with life at the Press, Pam and Greg geared my tasks toward my interests in art and writing. I learned to use InDesign and Photoshop to put together promotional materials like posters, press releases, and discount flyers, and I had the chance to interview the artist of the covers of the Press’ Contemporary Irish Writers Series, Gráinne Dowling. I was also assigned the job of starting up a Bucknell University Press account on Facebook, so we could have a presence on social media and hopefully get the word out to campus that a university press did in fact exist! The year flew by, and it was sad to say goodbye as graduation grew near, but I had acquired a unique glimpse into the workings of a small press that I would always value.

A few years later, I returned to Bucknell University to obtain a Master of Arts degree in English Literary Studies. One academic year passed by and Pam offered to take me on for some summer work. So I found myself at the Bucknell University Press once again, and it only felt natural to jump back into things. By this point in time, the Press’ social media presence had grown to include a Twitter account in addition to Facebook. Occasionally, I would post announcements here, but most of my time was spent designing ads and flyers in addition to an article on the history of the Press’ book catalogues for the Bucknell University Press blog page. The summer flew by, until it was time to say goodbye again. I spent the first two weeks of August 2017 abroad in Europe, and when it was time for the new semester to begin I returned to find out that my graduate assignment would be to work at the Press again as an editorial assistant. It was not goodbye after all!

Since August, I’ve continued my work here at the Press. Many things have changed from the time when I began my internship here in 2014. Among frequent social media posts, blog articles, interviews, contests, and author events, the presence of the Bucknell University Press has grown across campus. Other changes are in the works as well, including the transition from our partnership with Rowman & Littlefield to a new collaboration with Rutgers University Press beginning in 2018. Also new in 2018 will be a more central location for the Press at the Humanities Center on Bucknell’s campus. Located next to the Bertrand Library and adjacent to Vaughn Literature, which houses the English Department, this new building will take Bucknell University Press out of its current location in the basement of the Management building and into a space more suited to its genre. Surrounded by other organizations in the humanities, there are hopes that the Bucknell University Press will continue to grow with a more prominent presence on campus and in the scholarly world at large.

My on-and-off time at the Press has taught me much about what goes into running a small university press, as well as how much can change over the course of a few years. In celebration of University Press Week, which was instated in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter “in recognition of the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship,” I reflect on my own experience at the Bucknell University Press and all that I have learned along the way. The Press has certainly contributed to shaping my own culture and scholarship at Bucknell, as I am sure it has done for many others in the greater press community.

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).