Archives for December 2020

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.