Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

Archives for November 2021

by

University Press Week Day 4

#ReadUP on these 10 noteworthy Bucknell UP titles published in the last 10 years

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886

By Lenora Warren

“Readers will find Fire on the Water an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolitionism. Moreover, this book also makes major contributions to Black Atlantic studies and to maritime and oceanic studies at large. Scholars working in these fields will find Warren’s book essential reading. They will also find the book’s clarity and concision impressive. Fire on the Water will teach well in both the undergraduate and graduate classrooms.”

 —ALH Online Review

Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone

By Shanee Stepakoff

“The poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.”

 —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen R. Gillespie

“Gathering a tapestry of disparate materials, including reviews, letters, interviews, drama, critical essays, memoirs, and photos, Gillespie constructs a rich critical narrative of Morrison’s works.”

—The Journal of African American History

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

By Manu Samriti Chander

“Brown Romantics challenges readers to rethink the play of race, religion, class, and nation across the nineteenth-century globe. Chander adroitly critiques the disabling rhetoric of nationalism as it confronts the democratic ideals undergirding each of the three poets he studies.”

 —Victorian Studies

Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Edited by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

“The editors of Indiscreet Fantasies have compiled a significant collection of essays that will be of interest to film scholars because they analyze cinema that sheds a new light on the representations of Iberian cultures and identities.”

—Isabel Estrada, author of El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo

Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century

By Joan L. Brown

“The balance of theory and data analysis provides a comprehensive view of the topic and, although examples are gleaned from Spanish and Latin American literature, Brown’s observations and recommendations are accessible, and pertinent, to other fields.”

—Hispania

The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence

By A.W. Barnes

“The story Barnes weaves in this memoir—a story of suicidal desires and success, of what drives siblings apart and could, at turns, bring them back together—is a lyric noir of family instability, personal revelation, and queer inheritance both genealogical and literary….Our job, as Barnes beautifully demonstrates here, is to take the ashes of our lives—not only our lived lives, but our lives as readers, too—and sculpt them into a new art.”


—Lambda Literary

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Chris Mounsey

“With respect to organization, Mounsey (Univ. of Winchester, UK) introduces a unique concept—to disability studies in general and certainly to 18th-century studies. The ten essays appear in three categories: “Methodological,” essays examining how disability is understood and represented by significant thinkers (1663 and 1788); “Conceptual,” essays looking at and problematizing representation of disability in literary works; and “Experiential,” essays examining how disability is represented by those who experienced it and left written records of their suffering. A few essays feature canonical figures (e.g., Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, Laurence Sterne), but most introduce overlooked, unknown texts, a result of impressive archival research. In this respect and others, the collection bridges disability studies and cultural studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.”

—CHOICE

Faust: A Tragedy, Part I

Translated by Eugene Stelzig

“This exciting new translation of Goethe’s Faust brings the text to life for a contemporary audience. Stelzig’s ‘flexible’ approach to poetic translation is eminently successful: the complexity of the text is allowed to emerge without completely sacrificing its poetry. I highly recommend it—especially for the classroom and first-time English readers of Faust.”

—Astrida Tantillo, University of Illinois at Chicago

Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature

Edited by Tim Wenzell

“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

by

University Press Week Day 3

Bucknell UP’s partnership with Rutgers UP a way for small presses to #KeepUP with the times

Like many citizens of the UP community, Bucknell University Press proudly participates in several collaborative relationships on and off our beautiful Lewisburg, Pennsylvania campus. Locally, we copublish a book series with Bucknell’s Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures, celebrating the art, culture, and history of African America and the African diaspora through textbooks, poetry, fiction in translation, and groundbreaking scholarship. Further afield we partner with the Goethe Society of North America on the New Studies in the Age of Goethe book series, and with the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society on their book series, Studies in Eighteenth Century Scotland. We also team with Bucknell’s Bertrand Library to make our new books fully and freely available to the Bucknell campus community through our institutional repository.

But perhaps our most significant collaboration is with a fellow AUPresses member.

In 2017, Bucknell University Press’s then-director Greg Clingham made the vital decision to dissolve BUP’s relationship with commercial academic publisher Rowman & Littlefield in favor of a new partnership with Rutgers University Press for the production, promotion, sale, and distribution of our books and journals. At a time when economies of scale are so critical, particularly to smaller, underresourced publishers trying to do business in the age of powerful conglomerates, partnering with a like-minded, mission-driven university press has brought measurable advantages.

Beginning in the fall of 2018, new Bucknell University Press book projects became fully integrated with the Rutgers University Press workflow from manuscript transmittal to bound book and beyond. Bucknell University Press authors and editors now benefit from the experience of Rutgers UP’s project editors, publicists, designers, and marketing staff, as well as its business relationships with printers, foreign sales agents, and the Chicago Distribution Center. Through Rutgers, Bucknell University Press, which publishes about 20 new books annually, has been able to professionalize its own in-house systems through access to Firebrand’s Title Management bibliographic database, and can retrieve and track granular sales data 24/7 at the touch of a button through the CDC.

Most meaningfully—particularly to our authors!—this partnership allows Bucknell University Press to bring out its books simultaneously in affordably-priced paperback, cloth, and multiple eBook editions for a range of readers. This materially supports our mission to disseminate new scholarship as broadly and accessibly as possible.

Notably, this innovative partnership frees Bucknell University—a small, liberal arts college for which a fifty-year-old university press might seem a luxury—from many of the typical overhead costs (think printing, binding, warehousing, shipping); instead, we can focus efforts and resources on signing and developing exceptional books in the humanities and expanding our editorial list thoughtfully over time.

This collegial relationship has also been a synergistic one. Rutgers University Press director Micah Kleit offers, “We are proud to be Bucknell’s publishing partner. BUP’s books are of the highest scholarly quality, and have added luster to our own list, allowing us to keep company with each other in significant ways, through conferences, domestic and international sales, and through heightened awareness of our programs. Our books speak to each other, and in so doing have made both presses stronger.”

Rutgers UP editorial director Kim Guinta suggests that for the larger press, such a partnership “extends what we can offer our authors—Rutgers’ Latin American studies list tends toward the social sciences, for example, but I can suggest that people with Latin American projects in the humanities talk to Bucknell, thus increasing your pipeline but also highlighting our usefulness to authors.”

She remarks further about the collaboration that, “It’s fun. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the BUP staff, and our willingness to work together and figure out solutions to problems makes us all more connected to the UP world. I really enjoy the camaraderie and the feeling of team-building involved.

“The partnership has also given me a better appreciation for the hurdles small presses face. I think that the way we’re working can relieve some of that pressure of having to go it alone or be taken advantage of. We hope the partnership makes BUP feel instead part of a supportive web of university press publishing.”

It does indeed. Ours is not the only big press/little press collaboration in the UP universe, certainly. That such partnerships among AUPresses members are becoming more common may speak in part to the need for mission-driven university presses to distinguish themselves from commercial academic publishers by—among other things—strategically aligning with their peers. Three years into the Bucknell-Rutgers partnership seems a fitting time to take stock of this successful and mutually beneficial initiative, and to highlight it as a financial and organizational model—at once practical and congenial—that could help to ensure the sustainability of very small presses into the future.

by

University Press Week Day 2

Bucknell UP welcomed these 10 developments over the past 10 years, making it a force to #KeepUP with.

Since 2012, Bucknell University Press…

1. Celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018.

2. Became a full member of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) in 2020.

3. Saw the retirement of its longtime director, Greg Clingham, at the end of 2018 after 22 years of service to the Press.

4. Welcomed, in 2019, Suzanne Guiod as its first fulltime, non-faculty director.

5. In 2018, entered into a new distribution partnership with Rutgers University Press.

6. Began to release all new books simultaneously in paperback, cloth, and ebook formats as a result of its new arrangement with RUP.

7. Made all new publications since 2018 available free of charge to Bucknell students, faculty, and staff via Bucknell’s Digital Commons.

8. Saw the creation of two new book series, Scènes francophones: Studies in French and Francophone Theater (edited by Logan Connors) and Campos Ibéricos: Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures (edited by Jason McCloskey and Isabel Cuñado).

9. Took over the publication of two long-running annuals, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiry in the Early Modern Era (edited by Kevin L. Cope) and The Age of Johnson (edited by Jack Lynch & J. T. Scanlan), both in their 24th year.

10. Upgraded its office space in 2018 when it moved from the basement of Taylor Hall, the oldest building on campus, to the top floor of the newly-renovated and named Hildreth-Mirza Humanities Center.

by

University Press Week Day 1: Guest blogger Manu Chander

To kick off the 10th annual University Press Week (UP Week) celebration, we invited author Manu Samriti Chander to share his thoughts on publishing with university presses and why they matter. Professor Chander’s first book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017, calls for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Reviewers agree, proclaiming it “the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time”[1] and declaring, “[t]here’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”[2]

“‘Leo’s’ poems have not even the thinnest guise of poetry. They illustrate a strain of trite, and often silly reflection, and a sentiment of ‘goodiness’ that is nauseating.” That was one London reviewer’s assessment of a poetry collection called Leo’s Poetical Works, which was published in 1883. The author in question, “Leo,” was an Afro-Guianese poet and essayist whose birth name was Egbert Martin. The review, which appeared in the Saturday Review on May 3, 1884, made its way across the Atlantic and back to Martin, who, understandably, took offense, writing in the preface to his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics, “Some…held that my book of poems published in 1883 contained too much ‘goody-goodiness,’ and I must confess that I have deliberately searched through at least two dictionaries without being able to discover such a word.” In a world in which an English reviewer’s opinion would always trump that of a Black colonial subject, Martin nevertheless found a way to express his frustration with the imperial order of things.

I learned of Martin’s poetry while conducting research for my first book, Brown Romantics, which looked at the way that colonial writers in the nineteenth century struggled to be considered as what Emerson (whom Martin had read and admired) called a “representative man”: “a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.” Or, in the case of the Brown Romantics, a poet capable of unifying diverse readers into a coherent whole. Martin, along with such figures as Henry Derozio in India and Henry Lawson in Australia, saw poetry as a means of community-building, a way of forging connections among peoples through the shared experience of reading. My book sought to recognize these figures in a way that reviewers from centers of literary power rarely did. 

Shortly after the publication of Brown Romantics, as I was preparing an edition of Martin’s collected works, I visited Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, Guyana, where, I knew from my research, Martin was buried. When I arrived at the cemetery office I was met by a woman who had never heard of the poet. She asked me to write down his information, name and date of death: “Egbert Martin,” I wrote, “June 24, 1890.” Just wait, she told me, and she headed to a back room, returning after several minutes with a large log book. When she found the page for June 1890, my heart sped up, and it continued to race as she ran her finger down the yellowed page. It landed on Martin’s name, penciled in neat cursive. Age: 29. Nation: Demerara. The log indicated where he was buried by division (New General), space number (30), and grave number (108). I asked if I could visit the spot, and I was told it’s a “mud grave,” no marker, nothing to see.

“Pecuniary success,” wrote Martin in the preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, “is…outside the Author’s anticipations; and fame, the idol of so many, for him has so little attraction that he cares not so much as to couple his name with his works.” And yet, we know from his response to his London critic, he was not without pride. I wonder what it might have meant to him to know that, over a one-hundred twenty years later, someone would see in his poetry something more than “trite” and “silly” “goodiness.” I wonder what it might have meant to him, as he labored daily over his verse, a “confirmed invalid,” as one British Guianese newspaper described him, largely confined to his home at 317 East Street in Georgetown (this, at least, is the address listed in an issue of the London periodical Truth on January 6, 1887)–I wonder what it might have meant for him to know that someone would one day see in the poems he wrote a serious contribution to that literary movement we call “Romanticism,” worthy of collecting and making available to readers across the globe.

Poetry is not as popular as it was in Martin’s time (although it is making a bit of a comeback). It is not regularly published in daily newspapers for readers to peruse casually as they get caught up on the events of the day. Nor is the study of poetry the stuff of popular books, not usually at least. It is largely sustained by scholars and, importantly, publishers who see value in poetic labor, both the labor of producing poetry and that of thinking through poetry in prose. Beyond–to recall Martin’s phrase–“pecuniary success,” we believe that something is gained, that the world is somehow better when we reserve a space for the analysis of line breaks and metrical substitutions, textual variations and publication histories. Perhaps that belief makes us Romantics, as well. If so–if we who publish with and work for university presses are inheritors of certain Romantic commitments–we have figures such as Martin to thank for sustaining these commitments, and for reminding us to sustain them as well.

Manu Samriti Chander is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently editing The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP) and writing a second monograph, Browntology, under contract with SUNY Press.

[1] “Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century.”
— Papers on Language and Literature

[2] “This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”
— Romantic Circles