Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

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Yves Bonnefoy Wins FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages

In September of 2013, French poet and Bucknell University Press author (b. 1923) was awarded the 23rd FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages. The jury, which consisted of seven prominent writers and literary critics, stated that Bonnefoy “integrates vanguard to the pillars of modern poetry, like Baudelarie, Celan or Rimbaud.” Bonnefoy is the first prize winner to have been recognized for writing in French. The prize, which Bonnefoy adds to an impressive list of awards that includes the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca (1995) and the Frank Kafka Prize (2007), will be presented on November 30th at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Emily Grosholz’s English-translation of Bonnefoy’s Début et Fin de la Neige (Beginning and End of the Snow) was published with Bucknell University Press in 2012 and has been called an “exquisite English translation” by Richard Wilbur. The edition features an introduction written by Bonnefoy previously unpublished in French or English, as well as illustrations by Iranian artist Farhad Ostovani. Read more about Bonnefoy’s award here.

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Editor Profile: Alf Siewers and Katherine Faull: Stories of the Susquehanna Valley

Stories of the Susquehanna
Prayer Rock, North Branch of the Susquehanna River near Wyalusing, PA
Photo courtesy of David Minderhout

Professors Alf Siewers and Katherine Faull on the new series “Stories of the Susquehanna Valley”

by Bryell StClair, ’14

This first volume in the new Stories of the Susquehanna Valley series describes the Native American presence in the Susquehanna River Valley, a key crossroads of the old Eastern Woodlands between the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay in northern Appalachia. Combining archaeology, history, cultural anthropology, and the study of contemporary Native American issues, contributors describe what is known about the Native Americans from their earliest known presence in the valley to the contact era with Europeans. They also explore the subsequent consequences of that contact for Native peoples, including the removal, forced or voluntary, of many from the valley, in what became a chilling prototype for attempted genocide across the continent. Euro-American history asserted that there were no native people left in Pennsylvania (the center of the Susquehanna watershed) after the American Revolution. But with revived Native American cultural consciousness in the late twentieth century, Pennsylvanians of native ancestry began to take pride in and reclaim their heritage. This book also tells their stories, including efforts to revive Native cultures in the watershed, and Native perspectives on its ecological restoration.

While focused on the Susquehanna River Valley, this collection also discusses topics of national significance for Native Americans and those interested in their cultures. We spoke to Professors Siewers and Faull, editors of this exciting new series, to get a better perspective on their inspiration and direction.

 

What is the inspiration for this book series?

This series emerged from work at Bucknell and neighboring universities on highlighting narratives of place in the Susquehanna watershed. Several years ago, representatives of the Nature Conservancy told us that one of the greatest needs for conservation work in the watershed was a stronger narrative of regional landscape and place. That charge also was given to us by a regional consortium of universities concerned with environmental issues, the Susquehanna Heartland Coalition. Our Northern Appalachian watershed was an important part of the development of America, rich in history and cross-cultural contacts, but much of that history has been largely invisible in recent generations at a regional and national level.

Simultaneously, we had been working at Bucknell to develop environmental humanities programs, and to develop theoretical work on the relation between landscape and narrative in different cultures, from the standpoint of the humanities, at both Bucknell’s Environmental Center and Environmental Studies program, and in our own work. That scholarly and curricular work informed the series greatly, including even in its planned inclusion of a natural history volume, in which scientists are working with a creative writer to help renew the genre of scientific narrative writing as natural history, but at a regional level.

 

How are you personally connected to the Susquehanna Valley and the idea of an environmentally sustainable human community?

As residents of the Valley, and working at an institution near the Valley’s Confluence, we were struck by how localism and rich local cultures in the Valley can be a source of strength, in terms of quality of life and sustainability. But those diverse historical, literary, and cultural narratives need to be highlighted more in relation to one another. The river has often been a neglected resource. Some accept an embarrassed attitude toward living in this tremendously varied watershed, which covers three states in an historical heartland of America. Involvement in hiking, kayaking, and raising children in the Valley, and seeing its potential for sustainable living, in relation to issues such as the local food movement, also strengthened our personal connections to the region. Katie’s involvement also came from her long-standing archival research on the Moravians in the region and their relationships with Native cultures, from which have developed relationships today between environmental efforts in the Valley and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Delaware peoples. My involvement came partly from my interest in regional landscape conservation in my past work as an environmental journalist, and my work in environmental criticism and semiotics. Sustainability needs to involve relationship and commitment to place, and this series is an expression of a desire to work that out in scholarship that is also publicly accessible and able to stimulate discussions and change in areas of both conservation and community.

 

Minderhout’s book Native Americans in the Susquehanna River Valley, Past and Present is the first of this series to be published. What other aspects of life in the Susquehanna Valley would you like to see featured?

Future volumes are planned to present aspects of coal-town life, early contact between Moravians and native cultures in the Valley, its natural history, formative literary and utopian experiments, and the development of distinctive rivertown cultures. We hope to continue to include more authors from a variety of institutions, and to cover contemporary issues in the Valley as well.

 

What types of multimedia approaches will be developed in concert with the books?

We have been working with the “Envision the Susquehanna” initiative of the Chesapeake Conservancy (both of us serve on the initiative’s advisory board) to develop an interpretive digital atlas of the region, which will provide online resources to accompany the book series, as well as interpretive materials for the National Park Service’s national historic water trail, which now includes the Susquehanna. The inclusion of the Susquehanna in that national system last year came about partly because of the work being done at Bucknell to develop these online mapping components.

 

How important is this topic to the academic community and beyond? What impact do you see this series having within academia and the on the discourse of sustainable development?

To us, the series illustrates the potential for a new nexus of the humanities, environmental studies, digital research, and regional studies, which in academia can help with addressing the future of the humanities. The study of story and narrative in relation to landscape, including revived narratives of natural history, provide an opportunity for showing how the humanities on their own terms can develop models for questioning and enriching approaches to the environment, and contribute to a stronger sense of community and sustainability. The humanities, as exemplified in this series, provide a definition of sustainability that focuses on meaningfulness, in which story (as the series title suggests) is central, and can be both scholarly and accessible.

 

How will this series to appeal to local residents?

People in this region of all backgrounds are interested in local history, and there are aspects to those local histories that connect to one another closely and to the watershed as a whole, including often neglected historical elements such as Native American history and Native cultures as a living tradition in the Susquehanna Valley, as seen in David Minderhout’s book. We look forward to more such contributions to the series in the future, on a variety of cultures and approaches to living in a region, contributing to realization of a sustainable and meaningful landscape in our shared watershed.

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Editor Profile: Aníbal González

Aníbal Gonzalez, Editor, Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory
Aníbal González, Editor, Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Professor Aníbal González on his work with the Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory series

by Jen Weber, 2012-13 Cynthia Fell Intern

This series of books provides a forum for some of the best criticism on Latin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches. By acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series welcomes a consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory. Aníbal González, professor at Yale University, has worked as the editor of this series for many years. While balancing his own professional and academic goals, he has devoted an ample amount of time and support to the development of the series. Here, we speak with Professor González about his experiences in order to recognize his efforts and commitment.

 

How many years have you worked on the series? How many books have you worked with?

I’ve worked fourteen years in the series, since its founding in 1999.  I was professor of Spanish at Penn State at the time. I had the good fortune of chatting with Greg Clingham at a reception in State College, and we both remarked on the fact that Bucknell University Press has a long tradition of publishing scholarship on Iberian and Latin American literatures; from there, it took almost no time at all for Greg to propose the idea of creating the series, and I was honored that he chose me as its editor. The series has published 37 books so far, and I’ve been closely involved in the process of selecting all of them.

Describe the aim of the series. What kind of impact has it had on the field of Latin American studies?

The series aims to publish the best new scholarly books about Latin American literature, with particular interest in books that combine scholarly research with innovative theoretical approaches.  Featuring works by both junior and senior Latin Americanist scholars, the series is well-known as a venue for rigorous research works on virtually all of the major genres and periods of Latin American literature: from Colonial chronicles and poems, through nineteenth-century narrative and journalism, to the Latin American “Boom” narratives of the 1960s and contemporary Latin American theatre.

Have there been any notable titles in the series that stood out to you in particular?

Four books in particular—Santana’s Foreigners in the Homeland, Friis’s José Emilio Pacheco, Salgado’s From Modernism to Neobaroque, and Díaz’s Unhomely Rooms—are particularly meaningful for me as the first works we published, and for the high standards they set for the rest of the series.  More recently, Luciani’s Literary Self-Fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sampson’s Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones have given me special satisfaction, since Sor Juana and Ricardo Palma are among my all-time favorite Latin American writers.

Has the series changed at all while you’ve been involved? What kind of new work would you like to see the series introduce in the future?

Over the years, the series’s scope has broadened to include newer areas and approaches in Latin American literary research, such the nineteenth century and cultural studies.  I’d like to see more scholarly works submitted to the series on some of the great Latin American writers of today, including Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Volpi, Andrés Neuman, Santiago Gamboa, and Cristina Rivera Garza.

Are there any comparable series producing the same collection of works at this time?

Unfortunately, scholarly monograph series in general have been disappearing, as academic publishers have become more market-driven. Never abundant, Latin American studies series have dwindled dramatically even as Latin America has become more peaceful, prosperous, and democratic, and while its culture remains as lively and original as ever.  This makes the Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory even more unique.  With its intensive focus on literature and culture (other Latin American studies series favor the social sciences and current events), as well as in the quality and variety of its books, our series compares favorably with those from larger university presses, such as Duke and the University of Texas at Austin.

What kind of research and work are you involved with professionally right now? Do your academic interests overlap with the scholarship of the series? How does your editing fit into your own academic goals?

I’m currently writing a book about the appropriation of religious discourse in the twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American novel, from the Mexican Federico Gamboa in 1903 to the Chilean Roberto Bolaño in 2003.  It’s an ambitious undertaking, but I’m convinced it’s worth a try. I’m also collaborating with Gustavo Guerrero, a distinguished Venezuelan critic and Latin American studies editor for Gallimard, who lives and teaches in Paris, to establish an international research group on the subject of “Globalization and Latin American Literature.” My main field of expertise in Latin American literature is modernismo, a literary movement from the turn of the nineteenth century that set the stage for the great Latin American literature of the twentieth in virtually all genres.  Being an expert on modernismo has allowed me to work comfortably in earlier periods, even as far back as Colonial times, as well as in present-day Latin American literature. Editing has helped me fulfill two of my most cherished goals:  to mentor new critics and scholars and to encourage innovation in our field.

What do you enjoy most about your involvement with the series?

Above all, it’s the pleasure of keeping in touch with significant new research in my field and helping to bring that research to fruition in books edited and produced with extraordinary care and professionalism by Bucknell University Press.

 

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Check Out Lewisburg’s Most Eclectic Bookstore!

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Once you’ve walked into Mondragon bookstore in downtown Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, it would be difficult not to stay for awhile: walls decorated with vintage posters, eclectic postcards, and local artwork; cozy chairs flanked by tables with dishes containing chocolates; the cheery voices of friends enjoying tea in the back of the store; and, of course, an assortment of books stretching high and far, waiting to be discovered.

And that’s to say nothing of Mondragon’s founder, Mr. Charles Sackrey.  A retired economics professor who taught at Bucknell from 1980-2002, Mr. Sackrey is an engaged, progressive citizen, a keen storyteller, and always happy to recommend a book or two.  In speaking with Mr. Sackrey, one senses not only his considerable acumen in running a bookstore, but also his larger commitment to the used bookstore as a community center.  Indeed, Mr. Sackrey and his friends run the bookstore as a not-for-profit (the name Mondragon is taken from a worker-owned Spanish corporation), and its upstairs features a large, sunlit meeting space that is used by groups such as the Sierra Club and Organizations United for the Environment. Mondragon’s impressive book collection, which spans all disciplines, is aided by donations from Bucknell’s English department, faculty, and private libraries.

One of the charms of a used bookstore is that you never know what you might chance upon, whether an out-of-print edition of your favorite book or something completely unexpected.  Mondragon doesn’t disappointment here, with a sense of discovery running throughout the store.  In my time there I’ve found everything from environmental titles to books in the original Japanese.  There’s even a small selection of books published by our very own Bucknell University Press!  In short, Mondragon bookstore is one of those increasingly rare places marked by a slower pace of life and commitment to people over profits. In the words of Mr. Sackrey, “Every town needs a used book store.”

Mondragon is located at 111 East Market Street, Lewisburg, PA 17837.  They can be reached at (570) 523-1540.

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Photographs by Christopher Bradt

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Bucknell Press Author Wins SCMLA Prize!

Kay Pritchett, professor of Spanish at the University of Arkansas, has won the South Central Modern Language Association 2012 Book Prize!  We interviewed Professor Pritchett on her interest in Spanish poetry and her award-winning book, In Pursuit of Poem Shadows: Pureza Canelo’s Second Poetics (Bucknell University Press 2011).

How did you first become interested in Pureza Canelo and in Spanish poetry more generally? 

I was attracted to all things Spanish as a child, despite the fact that there was little in my Mississippi Delta upbringing to nudge me in that direction. In high school, I had an excellent Spanish teacher, Ms. Faye Chrismond, and decided then that Spanish would be my life’s work. In graduate school, where one usually chooses a genre as an area of concentration, poetry became my first love, given that, as a would-be critic, I appreciated the possibility of dealing with texts that, because of their brevity, readily lent themselves to in-depth analysis. My first book was on a group of Spanish poets, the novísimos, who are Canelo’s contemporaries. In expanding the parameters of that study, which had included only male poets, I began to peruse anthologies of contemporary poetry in search of feminine voices and became enthralled with Canelo’s early collections, Celda verde and Lugar común, both published in 1971. I had never before encountered verse that so radically defied standard Spanish, thereby inducing readers to discover new meanings and nuances. Those books of poetry, written at an early age, contained many of the themes that Canelo perceptively reworked in subsequent volumes.

You begin your book by writing that “the effect of Canelo’s poetry is to remind readers and, perhaps with more urgency, the poet herself that poetry understands little, perhaps nothing, of unqualified truth.” This is quite an old idea, going back at least to Ion, to what Plato viewed as the inherent problem of representation. In what ways does Canelo’s poetry explore the limitations of its form? 

I had to come to grips with this issue in Nature’s Colloquy with the Word and again in In Pursuit of Poem Shadows, given that Canelo confronts this quandary in each book she writes. In writing the first study, I recognized that Canelo is in essence a symbolist and, at the same time, a creacionista, literary creationist. She recognizes yet is unwilling to surrender to the impossibility of representation and, because of this, continues to search for ways to bring her experience of the natural world into the poem. She believes that she has met with success when she manages to finesse, no matter how briefly, a convergence between nature and the word. Moreover, she views poetry–as did the literary creationists who came before her (Vicente Huidobro, Gerardo Diego)–as something animal, mineral, and vegetable. Her objective is not merely to imitate nature but to create nature in poetry.

Describe for us the evolution of Canelo’s poetry. What are the significant points of change? 

Looking at Canelo’s books as a whole, one might view them as successive configurations of a writing space. The titles themselves suggest this: Celda verde (Green Cell), Lugar común (Common Place), El barco de agua (The Water Boat, 1974), and so on. The first major change came in her fourth book, Habitable (Inhabitable, 1979), in which she leaves behind an experiential approach and initiates a dialogue with what she has called the “cuerpo enjuto del poema” (lean body of the poem). In due course, the poematic speaker develops a “love relationship” of sorts with the poem, a development that has led some readers to think of certain volumes, especially Pasión inédita (Unpublished Passion, 1990), as love poetry. For me, however, it is difficult to think of Canelo’s poetry as anything other than a splendid, ongoing colloquy between poet and poem, one that generates striking imagery and remarkable insights. In this latter volume, she comes to regard poetry as “unpublished passion,” the implication being that poetry is not the finished poem but, rather, the creative process during which her passion for writing achieves jouissance. After this last volume, Canelo becomes discontented with this portrayal of the poet-poem relationship and comes up with the notion of “frugal poetry.” In the ironically titled book No escribir (Not to Write, 1999), she conceives of an unencumbered writing space, like the sky, that allows the poet to take flight, write spontaneously, instinctively. This is the last stage that I examined in In Pursuit of Poem Shadows. In a couple of recent conference papers and articles I have looked at subsequent books, three to date, and would say that, on the whole, they have remained true to this last approach–even if, from time to time, one detects a kind of nostalgia on the poet’s part for the hieros gamos (holy marriage between poet and poem) that she achieved in Pasión inédita.

In the book’s forward you mention that you sat down for an interview with Pureza Canelo in 2005. How did that interview inform your book? How did you balance the author’s comments with your readings of her works?

I attempted at that time to get a clear answer concerning an ambiguity that often arises in her compositions. I am referring to the matter I have just mentioned concerning the meaning of “love” within Tendido verso (Stretched Out Verse, 1986), Pasión inédita, and several other volumes. Canelo is a very private person, and ultimately I decided not to press the question of the relevance of a love interest to the poems. What I discovered, as I examined the poems over time, is that there is really no clear reference to a human lover, even in poems that personify the speaker’s “love interest.” In my view, her interlocutor is consistently the poem. However, if a reader chooses to read the poems as love poems, as some critics have, I have no interest in challenging that interpretation.

Pureza Canelo is, of course, still active. Are there any challenges specific to writing about an author still being published–particularly one such as Canelo, whose poetry you suggest has evolved so markedly?

I haven’t found this to be a problem, since I realized early on that Canelo’s poetry follows a path of periodic switchbacks. This is true of some of the greatest poets, Juan Ramón Jiménez, for example. As I receive each book, I look forward to discovering how far Canelo has gotten in her identity search and what her next destiny might be, given that she often provides some sort of hint toward the end: what she likes about her new “lodgings” and what about them she finds confining.

Are there any words you’d like to leave us with? 

I might add that, although Canelo and I have spoken on only two occasions, there are few people with whom I feel a stronger bond. Reading her poetry and writing about her splendid evolvement as a writer has been at the center of my scholarship since 1989. Although she has humbly called herself a “minor poet,” I find her writing as interesting as that of Jiménez or Antonio Machado, who are, doubtless, two of Spain’s greatest twentieth-century poets. She is challenging, but an encounter with such poetic genius is well worth the effort.

 

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Author profile: Emily Grosholz on translation

Emily Grosholz discusses the craft of translation and her most recent collaboration with French poet Yves Bonnefoy: Début et fin de la neige / Beginning and End of the Snow. The book, published by Bucknell University Press in 2012, includes Bonnefoy’s original poems in French opposite Grosholz’s English translations as well as artwork by Farhad Ostovani.

 

What first attracted you to Yves Bonnefoy’s poems?

When I was in graduate school, studying philosophy at Yale University in the 1970s, I was introduced to the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy by a fellow student who lent me a copy of Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. I thought it was wonderful—haunting— and translated some of the poems in it, just for myself. Returning from a year in Germany in September 1977, I learned that Bonnefoy was teaching at Yale that semester, and so attended his lectures on Baudelaire and Hugo, those two great and utterly disparate poets, both of whom I’d tried my hand at translating earlier, in high school and college. At the end of the semester, I gave Bonnefoy some of my translations of his work, and some of my own poems, in particular an elegy for my mother that I wrote in Germany, “Letter from Germany,” the first of my poems to be published in the Hudson Review. He was very appreciative, we struck up a correspondence, and I got to know him and Lucie Vines Bonnefoy a bit when I spent half a year in Paris in 1981. I have been translating his poetry ever since, somewhat haphazardly, choosing poems that I especially liked. Because his sensibility seemed close to my own while his poetic habits were very different, it was a challenging combination.

How do you approach the task of translating another writer’s work?

At first, I dealt with the affinity-and-distance by writing ‘versions,’ like Robert Lowell, allowing myself a great deal of freedom in departing from the original text. I like some of my translations from this earlier stage, especially “To the Voice of Kathleen Ferrier,” which is included in the forthcoming collection Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology, edited by Paula Deitz. But after collaborating with Larissa Volokhonsky on translations of poems by the Russian poet Olga Sedakova, I was persuaded that I should try harder to remain true to the original, its vocabulary and prosody. Thus I went about translating Début et fin de la neige in a different way, after Yves Bonnefoy asked me to translate this ‘American’ book of poetry, inspired in part by the time he spent teaching at Williams College. I consulted with the poet (and his American wife Lucie Bonnefoy) more often, going over every line, and listened more attentively to their advice.

What is the connection between the artwork and the poems in Beginning and End of the Snow, and why did you and Yves Bonnefoy choose to include Farhad Ostovani’s watercolors in the book?

Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the greatest post-war French poet, and has worked with many important artists, including Giacometti, Tàpies, Cartier-Bresson, Ubac and Miró, as well as more recently Alechinsky, Palézieux and Ostovani. I think the explanation why he and Ostovani have collaborated on almost two dozen books and catalogues in the recent past is the excellence of the artist’s work and Bonnefoy’s accurate estimation of it. Farhad Ostovani was born in northern Iran and lives and works in Paris; his work has been exhibited at the Jenisch Museum (Switzerland), the Museum at the Rembrandt House (Netherlands), the Morat Institute for Art and Art Research (Germany) and the Chateau de Tours (France). Thus it was natural to ask if we could use some of his work for this book too.

Are you working on any other projects in conjunction with Bonnefoy or Ostovani?

Five years ago, I collaborated on a book with Farhad Ostovani, Feuilles / Leaves, with translations of my poems into French by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat; it was published by William Blake & Co. in Bordeaux. I wrote an ‘ekphrastic’ poem about one of his works, which was published in American Arts Quarterly last year; and I recently published a review of one of his exhibitions as well as a poem dedicated to him (and Orhan Pamuk) in the Hudson Review. I plan to go on translating the poems of Yves Bonnefoy in my accustomed, haphazard, admiring way now that the book is finished.

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Author Profile: George Haggerty on Horace Walpole’s Letters

In a study that offers a lively account of eighteenth-century life through the perspective of one of its greatest eccentrics, Horace Walpole, George Haggerty opens a window onto both the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century and the codification of friendship as the preeminent value in Western culture.  Haggerty’s new book Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century (2011), argues that the letters are themselves one of the greatest literary accomplishments of the eighteenth century, and, in an interview with us, details why.  Distinguished Professor of English at University of California-Riverside and one of the most celebrated scholars in the fields of eighteenth-century and gay studies, Haggerty is the first author to publish in Bucknell’s exciting new series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850.

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1)  How did you begin this project? What sparked your interest in Horace Walpole?

I have been interested in Horace Walpole since my first class in Gothic literature, which I took as an undergraduate at the College of Holy Cross.  My first book (Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form) had a section on Walpole, as did Men in Love and Queer Gothic. The former of those two publications had quotations from Walpole’s correspondence with Thomas Gray, and  think I launched into the Walpole letters not long after finishing Men in Love in 1999.

2)  Your reading of Walpole’s letters emphasize his tendencies toward eccentricity and complexity.  What kind of man was he?

Walpole was an eccentric bachelor who lived his life by and through his many friends with whom he corresponded throughout the eighteenth century.  Walpole collected objects—both local English artifacts and those from Europe and farther afield.  He talks about these objects at length in his letters.  He also talks, of course, about his family—his father was Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister—and about his friends; both their social and political concerns, their literary interests, their health, and their personal involvement with himself, his house—the famous Gothic country house, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham—and his family.  He also writes about his worries about his own experiences in the world, his sense of himself as a gentleman, the nature of his many friendships, and the characteristics that he and his many friends share.  In addition to reading voraciously and writing countless letters, he also traveled, at least early in his life, he studied painting and architecture, partly as the result of his own family collections in Houghton House, and writes about antiquarian interests.

3)  The text aims at recovering the letters as literary objects “in themselves.”  Can you say more about the methodology that drives this study?

In the past, Walpole’s letters have served as a repository of historical detail and intelligent responses to that detail.  The index prepared by the Yale editors, led by W. S. Lewis, mean that the collections was “searchable” even before the digital age.  My interest, however, lies in the letters themselves as an artifact, both individually—some of the individual letters could be classed among the best letters to have been written in our language—and as a whole—Walpole’s collection stands alone as a literary accomplishment of the highest order.  In this study, I try to look at the individual letters and the collection of letters—the Correspondence—in this way.

4)  How does Walpole’s sense of friendship distinguish him from other copious eighteenth-century letter writers: i.e., Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Richardson?  How does this collection situate him within the eighteenth century republic of letters?

There is no other collection like Walpole’s, either in the eighteenth century or in any other time.  In the first place, Walpole was conscious of writing about his age, and several of his letters characterize the period between 1750 and 1800 as few historians have been able to do.  He writes in depth, moreover, about a range of topics that exceeds the range of interests of most other letter writers.  Finally, Walpole writes in a voice that is both more public and more private.  There is an uncanniness about his letters—even in ones that he clearly intended for publication—by means of which we are made to feel that we are overhearing the private thoughts of an intelligent and sensitive individual.  That’s why these letters are as addictive as they are.

5)  What do you mean by an “alternative masculinity,” and how are Walpole’s letters evidence of this?

Historians of sensibility and theorists of masculinity have written about the later eighteenth century as a complex age of transition for British masculinity.  Earlier in the century a libertine model was articulated as admirable even when feared.  By later in the century more lachrymose males were celebrated and at times held up for emulation.  Walpole displays in his letters a clearly articulated sense of masculinity that does not fit any of the models available at the time.  Sensitive and intelligent, politically alive and obsessed over decorative detail, wildly solipsistic and at the same time devoted to his friends, unmarried but deeply intimate with many of those close to him, both male and female, Walpole stands out as a special case, one that does not fit the molds we have for masculinity.  If we rush at Walpole with our own straight/gay dichotomy from the later twentieth century, we not only come up short but we distort the Walpole that we are trying to find.  The letter shows us a man who defies such categories—he clearly loves many of his male friends and there are women with whom he is intimate as well—and who establishes for himself what it is to be a man in a culture of radical change.  I try to take the opportunity of this study to look at what the figure in the letters creates for himself and for his readers.  The closer we can look at at that and the more carefully we can come to understand it, the more we will understand about masculinity in the eighteenth century.  Rather than imposing our own terms, that is, we will discover Walpole’s own terms for his personal eccentricity.  I think the results are exciting.

And so do we! Read more about Haggerty’s book here and here.