Bucknell University Press

Celebrate and learn during Black History Month with texts from the Griot Project Book Series, an interdisciplinary series published in association with the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures. 

A griot is a central figure in West African cultures that historically held many functions, including community historian, cultural critic, indigenous artist and collective spokesperson. At Bucknell University, the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures provides faculty and students intellectual and creative engagement with the interdisciplinary investigation of the cultures, histories, narratives, peoples, geographies and arts of Africa and the African diaspora. 

Bucknell University Press is honored to extend the Griot Institute’s mission by publishing monographs, collections of essays, and poetry exploring the aesthetics, art, history, and culture of African America and the African diaspora. “In bringing out new creative and scholarly work that complements the Griot Institute’s programming, we honor the vision of founding series editor Carmen Gillespie,” says Suzanne Guiod, Bucknell University Press Director.

Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone

by Shanee Stepakoff

Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. 
 
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity

Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities.

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

by Frieda Ekotto

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. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Too Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

Postracial America?: An Interdisciplinary Study

Edited by Vincent L. Stephens and Anthony Stewart

The concept of a “postracial” America —the dream of a nation beyond race — has attracted much attention over the course of the presidency of Barack Obama, suggesting that this idea is peculiar to the contemporary moment alone. Postracial America? An Interdisciplinary Study attempts to broaden the application of this idea by situating it in contexts that demonstrate how the idea of the postracial has been with America since its founding and will continue to be long after the Obama administration’s term ends. The chapters in this volume explore the idea of the postracial in the United States through a variety of critical lenses, including film studies; literature; aesthetics and conceptual thinking; politics; media representations; race in relation to gender, identity, and sexuality; and personal experiences. Through this diverse interdisciplinary exploration, this collection skeptically weighs the implications of holding up a postracial culture as an admirable goal for the United States.

In Media Res: Race, Identity, and Pop Culture in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by James Braxton Peterson

In Media Res 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

By Angèle Kingué, Translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley

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. 

Catastrophic Bliss

By Myronn Hardy

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

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen Gillespie

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison’s cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades.

Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison’s canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison’s friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama.

What distinguishes this bookfrom the many other publications that engage Morrison’s work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work.

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 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 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: 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

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 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

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.

“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

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

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 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

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

This year has been one we won’t soon forget. Every day seemed to bring another breaking news story, and the pandemic has kept us away from our friends, our families, and our coworkers.

Still, there has been much accomplished in 2020, and we at the Bucknell University Press have been busy continuing to publish scholarly monographs in a variety of fields. At times like this, thoughtful intellectualism and academic accomplishment are as important as ever, and we are proud to be able to bring our readers the works of fine authors the world over.

This December, we wanted to take a look back at the books published over the course of 2020. Check out the full, chronological list below, and click on any book’s title to be taken to our website where you can find out more information and order a copy.

1.) 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 25)

Edited by Kevin L. Cope

Volume 25 of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era investigates the local textures that make up the whole cloth of the Enlightenment. Unfurling in the folds of this volume is a special feature on playwright, critic, and literary theorist John Dennis. This celebration of Dennis mingles with a full company of a wide array of essays in the character of revealing case studies and tops it all off with a full portfolio of relevant reviews.

2.) The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen

By Marcie Frank

Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, Marcie Frank’s The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

3.) Beside the Bard: Scottish Lowland Poetry in the Age of Burns

By George S. Christian

4.) The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Stoke Newington Edition

By Daniel Defoe, edited by Maximillian E. Novak, Irving N. Rothman, and Manuel Schonhorn

Robinson Crusoe has been an international best-seller for three hundred years. An adventure tale involving cannibals, pirates, and shipwrecks, it embodies economic, social, political, and philosophical themes that continue to be relevant today. This edition of the novel with its introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes provides a uniquely scholarly presentation. There has been no other edition like it.

5.) Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Edited by Michael Demson and Christopher R. Clason

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, but among the Romantics, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life. The contributors to Romantic Automata open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.

6.) Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700-1831

By Daniel Gustafson

Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control.

7.) Transpoetic Exchange: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz, and Other Multiversal Dialogues

Edited by Marília Librandi, Jamile Pinheiro Dias, and Tom Winterbottom

8.) Between Market and Myth: The Spanish Artist Novel in the Post-Transition, 1992-2014

By Katie J. Vater

In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors whose largely realist novels portray a clash between the myth of artistic freedom and artists’ willing recruitment or cooptation by market forces or political influence. Today, in an era of rising globalization, the artist novel proves ideal for examining authors’ ambivalent notions of creative practice when political patronage and private sector investment complicate belief in artistic autonomy.

9.) Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

By Kathleen M. Oliver

Narrative Mourning explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanity’s newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person).

10.) Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800

Edited by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber

11.) Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media

Edited by Jakub Lipski

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. The essays here convince us that the genre’s formal and ideological adaptability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its enduring relevance to this day.

12.) Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Tanya M. Caldwell

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes.

13.) Mormons in Paris: Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892

Edited and translated by Corry Cropper and Christopher M. Flood

In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s.

14.) Johnson in Japan

Edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki

15.) Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship

Edited by Kevin L. Cope and Cedric D. Reverand II

During his forty-two years as president of AMS Press, Gabriel Hornstein quietly sponsored and stimulated the revival of “long” eighteenth-century studies. Whether by reanimating long-running research publications; by creating scholarly journals; or by converting daring ideas into lauded books, “Gabe” initiated a golden age of Enlightenment scholarship. Paper, Ink, and Achievement finds in the career of this impresario a vantage point on the modern study of the Enlightenment.

16.) Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson

Edited by Donald Ingram Ulin

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Writing Home offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations.

17.) Challenging the Black Atlantic: The New World Novels of Zapata Olivella and Gonçalves

By John T. Maddox IV

18.) Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Edited by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Offering in-depth analyses of fifteen different queer films from the Iberian Peninsula, this collection shows how a diverse group of filmmakers from regions including Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country have produced films that challenge the region’s conservative religious values and gender norms, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

19.) Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830

Edited by Mark C. Wallace and Jane Rendall

Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume­—the first full-length study of the subject in fifty years—examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830.

20.) Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century

Edited by Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham

21.) Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

Edited by Kevin L. Cope

Nowhere is distance so near-at-hand as in Enlightenment culture. Whether in the telescopic surveys of early astronomers, the panoramas of painters, the diaries of travelers, the prospects of landscape architects, or the tales of novelists, distance is never far in the background of the works and deeds of long-eighteenth-century artists, authors, and adventurers. Hemispheres and Stratospheres draws that background into the foreground.

December 16th marks the 245^th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. In honor of this witty and astute writer, we’d like to share some of our favorite books that reconsider and elucidate her work.

Each of these Jane Austen books were published as part of our longstanding Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 series, which explores literary, artistic, cultural, and historical interconnections of the long eighteenth century.

Jane Austen and Comedy

Edited by Erin M. Goss

Jane Austen and Comedy takes for granted two related notions. First, Jane Austen’s books are funny; they induce laughter, and that laughter is worth attending to for a variety of reasons. Second, Jane Austen’s books are comedies, understandable both through the generic form that ends in marriage after the potential hilarity of romantic adversity and through a more general promise of wish fulfillment. In bringing together Austen and comedy, which are both often dismissed as superfluous or irrelevant to a contemporary world, this collection of essays directs attention to the ways we laugh, the ways that Austen may make us do so, and the ways that our laughter is conditioned by the form in which Austen writes: comedy. Jane Austen and Comedy invites reflection not only on her inclusion of laughter and humor, the comic, jokes, wit, and all the other topics that can so readily be grouped under the broad umbrella that is comedy, but also on the idea or form of comedy itself, and on the way that this form may govern our thinking about many things outside the realm of Austen’s work. 

“An impressive compilation of erudite, thoughtful and thought-provoking essays, Jane Austen and Comedy is a seminal work of extraordinary scholarship — and one that is unreservedly recommended for community and academic library literary collections in general, and Jane Austen supplemental curriculum studies lists in particular.”
—Midwest Book Review

Jane Austen and Masculinity

Edited by Michael Kramp

Jane Austen and Masculinity is an eclectic collection of contemporary scholarship addressing the representation of men and masculinity in the fiction and popular adaptations of Austen. This anthology includes work by a variety of esteemed and emergent Austen scholars from around the world who engage in a dialogue on critical questions surrounding her fictional treatment of men and masculinity, such as historical (post-French Revolutionary) changes in social expectations for men and women, brothers and fathers, male lovers, soldiers and the military, queer and alternative sexualities, violence, and male devotees of Austen. The collection addresses Austen’s fiction, including her juvenilia, as well as the ongoing popular appeal of her work and the enduring Austen vogue. The work in this anthology builds on established critical discourses in Austen scholarship as well as important conversations in Masculinity Studies. 

“The essays brought together here provide a suitably kaleidoscopic view of maleness, both in Austen’s own works and in the reformulations and extensions of those works critically, cinematically, and fictionally. . . . As a whole. . . this book provides thoughtful variety in its views of men and masculinity associated with Austen’s novels, all the richer for its broader considerations of contexts and aftereffects of Austen’s men.”
—Eighteenth Century Intelligencer

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen

By Jocelyn Harris

In Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen, Jocelyn Harris argues that Jane Austen was a satirist, a celebrity-watcher, and a keen political observer. In Mansfield Park, she appears to base Fanny Price on Fanny Burney, criticize the royal heir as unfit to rule, and expose Susan Burney’s cruel husband through Mr. Price. In Northanger Abbey, she satirizes the young Prince of Wales as the vulgar John Thorpe; in Persuasion, she attacks both the regent’s failure to retrench, and his dangerous desire to become another Sun King. For Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, Austen may draw on the actress Dorothy Jordan, mistress of the pro-slavery Duke of Clarence, while her West Indian heiress in Sanditon may allude to Sara Baartman, who was exhibited in Paris and London as “The Hottentot Venus,” and adopted as a test case by the abolitionists. Thoroughly researched and elegantly written, this new book by Jocelyn Harris contributes significantly to the growing literature about Austen’s worldiness by presenting a highly particularized web of facts, people, texts, and issues vital to her historical moment. 

“Satire, Celebrity and Politics is unfailingly fascinating in its dissection of Jane Austen, the satirist, and the text is enhanced by a well-chosen selection of contemporary portraits and gloriously scurrilous cartoons. The “stories behind the stories” always make for an interesting read and Harris has produced a book that will be read with great pleasure by academics and devoted readers alike.”
—Jane Austen’s Regency World

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If you would like to discuss whether your work-in-progress might be right for Bucknell University Press or our Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 series, contact seg016@bucknell.edu or see our submission guidelines for more information.

You might know that November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but did you know that November is also National Life-Writing Month? Bucknell University Press’s catalog includes several exemplars of the genre, which we’re pleased to share with you here.

The Memory Sessions

by Suzanne Farrell Smith

Suzanne Farrell Smith’s father was killed by a drunk driver when she was six, and a devastating fire nearly destroyed her house when she was eight. She remembers those two—and only those two—events from her first nearly twelve years of life. While her three older sisters hold on to rich and rewarding memories of their father, Smith recalls nothing of him. Her entire childhood was, seemingly, erased. In The Memory Sessions, Smith attempts to excavate lost childhood memories. The result is an experimental memoir that upends our understanding of the genre. Rather than recount a childhood, The Memory Sessions attempts to create one from research, archives, imagination, and the memories of others. 

The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence

by A.W. Barnes

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Tanya M. Caldwell

Writing Lives in the Eighteenth Century is a collection of essays on memoir, biography, and autobiography during a formative period for the genre. The essays revolve around recognized male and female figures—returning to the Boswell and Burney circle—but present arguments that dismantle traditional privileging of biographical modes. The contributors reconsider the processes of hero making in the beginning phases of a culture of celebrity. New work on Frances Burney D’Arblay’s son, Alexander, as revealed through letters; on Isabelle de Charriere; on Hester Thrale Piozzi; and on Alicia LeFanu and Frances Burney’s realignment of family biography extend current conversations about eighteenth century biography and autobiography.

Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier

by Emma Alderson, edited by Donald Ingram Ulin

Writing Home offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country. Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

by Mikhail Bakhtin, edited by Slav N Gratchev and Margarita Marinova

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views: on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

The Imprisoned Traveler: Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon’s Italy

by Keith Crook

Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother.

Memoir

By Rosario Ferré, translated by Suzanne Hintz and Benigno Trigo

Memoir is Rosario Ferré’s account of her life both as a writer and as a member of a family at the center of the economic and political history of Puerto Rico during the American Century, one hundred years of territorial “non-incorporation” into the United States. The autobiography tells the story of Ferré’s transformation from the daughter of a privileged family into a celebrated novelist, poet, and essayist concerned with the welfare of Puerto Ricans, and with the difficulties of being a woman in Puerto Rican society. It is a snapshot of twentieth-century Puerto Rico through the lens of a writer profoundly aware of her social position. Included are many photographs that connect Ferré’s life with the story of her writing career.

Wreckage: My Father’s Legacy of Art & Junk

By Sascha Feinstein

In this memoir, Sascha Feinstein recounts life with his father, Sam Feinstein, who was both a brilliant artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage. 

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You can order these books by following the title links to their individual ordering page, or discover more books through our partnership with Rutgers University Press or distributed by Rowman & Littlefield.

Freed: The essays focus on Samuel Johnson’s connection to Japan and Japanese academia. To some, it may seem interesting or unexpected that Johnson is studied so seriously in the country. What is it about Johnson and his writing that attracts Japanese readers’ attention? How is it that Johnson—who, as you write, thought of Japan as remote, strange, and extraordinary—has come to be studied so?

Suzuki: Our whole book might be an answer to this question, and though it’s not easy to fully reply to it in a short passage, I’ll try. As Professor Eto in Chapter 1 shows, Johnson has been an icon—a representative literary figure—to us for a long time, someone in whom we can find something to which to aspire. Those Meiji people—who wanted to learn anything from abroad after Japan opened its doors—set the trend, and we find it was not just a temporary trend; the more we learn with him, the more inviting we find he is. Though Japan was a remote country to him, I dare say his works appeal to us. I assume affinities and parallels that we can feel in his multi-dimensional complexity might be part of the explanation.

Freed: How do you find Johnsonian studies in Japan fitting in with broader scholarship (eighteen-century or otherwise) in Japanese academia? How might the Johnson Society of Japan affect, or even effect, this situation?

Suzuki: A distinguished Johnsonian, Professor Harada, has been the president of the English Literary Society of Japan, one of the largest humanities societies in the country. His extensive knowledge, the clarity of his talks, his wide range of interests, and his general sociability are appreciated well in the greater milieu of Japanese academia and he has been a key figure in maintaining the Johnson Society of Japan. However, the Society recently has been struggling in recruiting new members, which is a shared problem among many literary societies in Japan.

Freed: Yuri Yoshino’s essay focuses on Jane Austen and the Japanese path to Johnson. Some recognize Austen’s “literary debt” to Johnson, and how, through Sōseki Natsume’s reading of Austen, Johnson indirectly influenced Sōseki’s work. How has Japanese academics’ engagement with writers like Austen shaped their understanding of Johnson and the field in general?

Ogawa: Today there is a large number of Japanese academics who are engaged in Austen research, many of whom are now taking interest in Sōseki’s contribution to the spreading of her work in early-twentieth-century Japan. As Yoshino has stated, Johnson’s interest in “engag[ing] in portraits” has much relevance to Austen’s realism. I think that many Austen scholars are able to see one of the key features of modern novels through Sōseki’s literary theory (which is now translated into English). Perhaps his novels such as Light and Dark,which are much indebted to Austen’s realism, also reveal how important Johnson’s legacy was for her and consequently for Sōseki.

Freed: How do you interpret Johnsonian studies’ affecting the way Japanese academics engage with writers like Mary Shelley, given your proposition that Johnson’s work (specifically Rasselas) more directly influenced Shelley’s Frankenstein than previously recognized?

Ogawa: If I am allowed to elaborate on my own experience, Johnsonian studies have literally opened my eyes to a new aspect of Mary Shelley’s novels. Perhaps there is still a shared feeling in Japan that Romantic studies must be explored within a certain field, namely from the pre-Romantic era to the Romantic era (including Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley). Tracing the origin back to the early eighteenth century is not an orthodox method. However, after looking closely at Johnson’s writing, I realized that there is clearly an important genealogy that runs through to Romantic literature. Now that I know Shelley had read Rasselas twice, I can confidently say that she was greatly influenced by Johnson’s pessimism as well as optimism about scientific progress that is portrayed in the novel.

Freed: Your introduction mentions the dilemma around understanding the need for promoting the sciences while still simultaneously promoting and encouraging the critical study of the humanities. What problems do you see potentially arising from an undervaluing of and/or a failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences as they are today in Japan?

Suzuki & Ogawa: In 2015 the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issued a statement that was widely understood as an encouragement to dismiss humanities in national universities. Things have changed over these five years and it seems that the worst is now behind us; students of the humanities have begun to regain confidence in their field’s values. But this year in October, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga denied six nominees to the Science Council of Japan, all of whom are from the humanities and social sciences, and this has sparked a huge debate about why he rejected them. The council, which was established in 1949, is the representative organization of the scientific community—not just those pursuing natural and life sciences, but also the humanities and social sciences. The council’s mission, which is to debate and offer solutions to the important scientific issues of the day, requires input not just from scientists but also from humanities experts. A failure to deeply understand the impact of Johnsonian studies on the social, physical, and life sciences in Japan would lead to cases like this, and we feel that valuing interdisciplinary research—such as Johnson was able to show—would promote the understanding of why both communities need to coexist in harmony.

Johnson in Japan, edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki, and with a foreword by Greg Clingham, is available in paperback, cloth, and ebook. To order, visit:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/bucknell/johnson-in-japan/9781684482412