Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

December 23, 2020 by Nathanael Freed

Bucknell University Press 2020 Year in Review

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

Beside the Bard argues that “Scotland” is a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation. Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational political and cultural affiliations.

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

Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz and Haroldo de Campos from three perspectives—comparative, theoretical, and performative. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.

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

We are inundated with game play today. Digital devices offer opportunities to play almost anywhere and anytime. No matter our age, gender, social, cultural, or educational background—we play. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 is the first book-length work to explore how the modern discourse of play was first shaped during this pivotal period (approximately 1770-1830).

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

The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today.

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

This incisive new study demonstrates how Columbian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella’s novel Changó el gran putas (1983) and Brazilian-born Ana Maria Gonçalves’ saga Um defeito de cor (2006) transcend Paul Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic to show revolutions, communities, and femininities that prophesy a just “New World.” 

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

Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period of improving transportation technology, expansion of intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In doing so the volume contributes to the increasingly global understanding of culture and communication.

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

December 16, 2020 by Madison Weaver

Celebrating Jane Austen Day

December 16th marks the 245th 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

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


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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

November 24, 2020 by Madison Weaver

National Life-Writing Month

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

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

The Dark Eclipse

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

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

Writing Home

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

Mikhail Bakhtin

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

The Imprisoned Traveler

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. 


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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

November 20, 2020 by Nathanael Freed

Interview with the Editors of Johnson in Japan

Johnson in Japan, a new collection of essays exploring the influence of Samuel Johnson and his work on Japanese academic and literary culture, was edited by Kimiyo Ogawa and Mika Suzuki, and published in October by Bucknell University Press. Here the editors speak with Presidential Fellow Nate Freed to discuss the collection and the state of humanistic studies in Japan. (Responses have been edited for clarity and concision.)

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized

November 13, 2020 by Madison Weaver

#ActiveVoices: Q&A on African American Arts

On the last day of University Press Week’s blog tour, hear from several of the voices behind African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity, edited by Sharrell D. Luckett. 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.

Q: It’s been nearly a year since African American Arts was published, and what a year it has been. In the introduction, you wrote that “this anthology anchors itself in a place that might be betwixt and between the not yet solved and the unsolvable, the never broken and the unbreakable, the dream deferred and the daydreamer. Borrowing from Childish Gambino, many of these essays function as a clarion call to not only wake up (upending from an induced, albeit conscious sleep—a state of un(rest)), but to stay woke.” How can arts, aesthetics, and activism help us continue to wake up and stay woke as we move into the future? How can organizations in the arts and humanities, like University Presses, continue to help raise up artist and activist voices?

African American Arts

Sharrell D. Luckett: Artists run the world. As long as artists continue to make art, the world has no choice but to evolve and revolve when necessary. As citizens we must engage in art to help guide us in our life-long pursuits. Art, broadly defined, speaks when no one or nothing else can. Organizations in the arts can continue to support artist-activist voices by providing platforms for artists to share their work. Funding is also critical to the sustainability of art in certain forms or with certain needs. And of course, connecting artists with audiences is always ideal.

Luckett is an award-winning director and bestselling author and editor of several books. At the University of Cincinnati, she is the Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting, professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, and faculty collaborator with College-Conservatory of Music. Luckett is the founding CEO of the Black Acting Methods Studio, a face-to-face, virtual, and mobile performance training institution.

Q: In the eleven months since African American Arts was published, what did you take away, from your own work or another essay in the collection, about the role of African American arts and activism in our society? What moment or statement stuck with you?

Genevieve Hyacinthe: ANOINTED. Like the North Star, the photoprint, Untitled (Anointed) (2017) by genius, Carrie Mae Weems, is the opening image of African American Arts, Activism, Aesthetics and Futurity, aligning the constituent essays into consonance. In it, Weems layers the word ANOINTED over a soft hue of red through which we see the majestic profile of Mary J. Blige. Two graceful arms enter the picture plane on the left just above Mary’s head, viewed in the midst of coronating her with a resplendent crown that hovers just above her distinctive copper-tinted hair, here swept up into a lush cluster. But the word, ANOINTED, is in the past tense. Mary is already Her Majesty, anointed, divine, whole, saved, omnipotent, ordained.  Our writing, like the placing of the crown, simply shines a light on what is both immanent and transcendent: We too are the ANOINTED ones following the Sovereigns near – Mary, Carrie, Sharrell, Kamala, Stacey, D. Soyini, Adrian, Wangechi, Alicia, Opal, Patrisse, bell… and nearer – Carmen, Octavia, Beverly B, Nina, Toni, Breonna, Tamir, Natasha, Riah, Dominique (Rem’mie), Sylvere… on and on…

Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Anointed). 2017 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hyacinthe is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Program at California College of the Arts.

Q: African American Arts speaks to futurity. At this critical political juncture, how can the arts help us envision and shape a more equitable future? How do concepts such as Afrofuturism and Transfuturism inform visions of the future in your own art?

Amber Johnson: Art aids us in Futurity because art is where the imagination lives. The future has yet to be written, experienced, or lived. With art, we get to imagine and build the future that we want. Artists have a very special place in society because they have the ability to project their ideas (ideas that don’t exist in the universe and visual world yet) and onto a blank canvas of their choosing with different forms of media in an effort to manifest the future that they want. When I think about Transfuturism, I think about the body being that blank canvas where imagination is projected. So the trans and non-binary body, just by way of existing, is a form of artistic futurity. 

Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Communication at St. Louis University, Co-Founder of the Institute for Healing Justice and Equity and Founder of The Justice Fleet.

Q: Your essay “The Conciliation Project as a Social Experiment: Behind the Mask of Uncle Tom-ism and the Performance of Blackness” discusses the intersection between the performing arts and activism through The Conciliation Project. Can you speak to the importance of the arts in activism, or in activism within the arts?

Tawnya Pettiford-Wates: As an organization, The Conciliation Project emerged because of an urgent need within our community to address the historic effects of race, racism and systemic oppression. We began initially by examining the thesis presented in a seminal novel of the American cultural continuum; “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”  by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was supposed to be a class project, an academic exercise. We had no idea that the creative process involved in this interrogation would transform a community and create a commitment to use the play we collaboratively created and the platform that the performance of Blackface and whiteface minstrelsy built for open and honest dialogue about America’s destructive and damaging legacy, would ultimately form a company. An arts organization that has, since its inception been dedicated to the restoration of lost stories/histories and the conciliation of our collective racial past through arts and activism. The Conciliation Project has performed and worked in communities regionally, nationally and internationally since 2001.
What makes the work of The Conciliation Project most effective in the arena of social justice and social change education and initiatives is the ability of the Dramatic Arts to empower disenfranchised or marginalized communities and facilitate a process whereby those communities tell their own stories regarding the significant issues and historic events that impact them. Transformative change is the goal and healing the traumatic and historic legacy of America’s racial dysfunction, and the destructive impact it continues to have on our lives and our culture. And finally, we believe, “All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.” —- August Wilson 

Pettiford-Wates is a Professor of Graduate Pedagogy in Acting and Directing at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the artistic director and founder of The Conciliation Project.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

November 10, 2020 by Pamelia Dailey

Curators of Creative Error

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

A parson tucked away in the tiny village of Ousby who formulates an evidence-free theory of the evolution of the earth.

A forgotten poet who imagines that the citizens of Saturn enjoy a marvelous overhead view of planetary rings.

A nutritionist whose dietary recommendations give clients so much energy that they exercise themselves to extinction.

Along with many other unusual persons granted a second life in university press books, these eighteenth-century thinkers could be generously styled creative, but they might also, more accurately, be deemed wrong.  Such eccentric if occasionally entertaining earners of that off-putting adjective, incorrect, epitomize the many real and fictional figures who missed the mark while showing a bit of creativity.  Whether bad leaders who erred their way to their destinations, such as HMS Bounty Commander William Bligh; whether “tech” inventors who max out at 98% accuracy, such as those who struggled to make an accurate clock for use in maritime navigation; or whether make-believe heroines like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, who never seems to know what is happening to her yet who ends up as lady of the manor, the erroneous outnumber the accurate in studies of the past.

Aided and abetted by an assortment of university presses, I have spent most of my professional life in (sometimes) creative commentary on the vast corpus of early modern errors.  A life spent in nonstop discussion of ideas that stand no chance of being true might qualify as “creative” in the worst sense: a diddling away of a tiny bit of talent on miscellaneous curiosities.  In this peculiar diversion of educational resources, I am far from alone.  By the brutally pragmatic standards of twenty-first century industry, the vast majority of what university presses publish must count as little more than a distraction from the pursuit of productivity.  The prognosis is not much better for those actively creating the cultural history of our own era.  Given the proliferation of discredited ideas in the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, we may infer that most of our notions will eventually end up among quaint collectibles, like old farm equipment nailed to the walls of a Cracker Barrel restaurant.

Creative thinking—figuring out the meaning of our history or artfully understanding the culture of yesteryear or discovering something in the past that has unexpected applications in the present or future—is largely about the sympathetic stewardship of error: the willingness to cut some slack to the past and to appreciate what even crackpots (perhaps inadvertently) achieved.  After all, mainstream figures like astronomers William and Caroline Herschel can seem freakish, what with sitting out, night after night, a brother and sister team looking at luminous smudges about whose true nature they have nary a clue.  In the effort to appreciate the productive irregularities of the past, university presses make a colossal contribution.  At 250 pages and under the imprimatur of a legitimizing institution, a university press book provides the perfect vehicle in which to observe not only one or two historically significant mistakes but to view manageable arrays of discarded phenomena or ideas—to reveal worthwhile patterns amidst a bevy of blunders.  The significance of the university press book as a genre expressing creative curatorial concern for the variably valuable paraphernalia of the past is easy to overlook.  A comparison between the compact modern university press book and an intelligent but unwieldy commercial synoptic production such as Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization will immediately show the amazing ability of the university press format to extract an abundance of knowledge from unusual topics.

When not studying the peculiarities of the long eighteenth century, I spent a certain amount of career time—over a decade—in “faculty” or “shared” university governance, dealing with the astounding range of people, activities, and administrative arrangements in a multi-campus public university.  This experience repeatedly showed the centrality of university presses for whatever remains of creativity in modern mega-universities.  By persisting in the protection of impracticalities, university presses keep their sponsor institutions honest, open, and, in a word, creative.  Reliably and consistently attracting media attention, university presses remind everyone that higher education really should be about innovative thought rather than about sport, grants, and state legislatures.  Throughout my years in university governance, I never ceased to be amazed at the reluctance among powerful administrators, when budget cuts came along, to withdraw even the slightest bit of support from a costly press that would never turn a profit.  Such, to make an odd comparison, is the power that religious symbols exert over Dracula.  Books that gleefully celebrate knowledge without concern for gain dazzle every eye and sear through resistance. They surprise even the skeptical with their sacramental power. The more peculiar, offbeat, and creative the volume, the stronger the enchantment.  Paying heed, in a university press book, to all those historical figures who made creative mistakes thus brings us happily back to the true, energetically creative purpose of universities.

Kevin L. Cope is Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University. He is the author or editor of dozens of books and articles, including Hemispheres and Stratospheres: The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment and, with Cedric Reverand, Paper, Ink, and Achievement: Gabriel Hornstein and the Revival of Eighteenth-Century Scholarship. He is also the founder and editor of the annual journal 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. A former member of the National Governing Council of the American Society for University Professors, Cope is regularly referenced in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and is a frequent guest on radio and television news and talk shows.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

November 9, 2020 by Pamelia Dailey

Amplifying Voices from Sierra Leone

A Guest Blog Post for University Press Week

“Sierra Leone, your tragedy was too painful to be a poem.
If you could speak, it would be raw in my bones!”
–Syl Cheney-Coker, “Lake Fire,” in Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)

My work in postwar settings has taught me that our moral indignation and empathic response to others’ pain sometimes recedes, and we grow numb, no longer capable of effective political action to prevent, oppose, or end injustice. Unlike sterile news reports, creative expression such as poetry can help us move past numbness and retain (or regain) a capacity to respond. After spending more than five years working as a psychologist and human rights advocate in international contexts, I was drawn to “found poetry,” a genre in which phrases from existing sources are presented in new ways. Found poetry is a vehicle for transforming seemingly indescribable events into literary expression, and powerfully impresses on the mind of the reader the voices of those affected.

I first encountered public transcripts from the UN-backed international war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone in 2005, when serving as a psychologist for the trials held in Freetown. It became evident to me that eleven years of civil war had resulted in a new reality in which the unthinkable had become a part of daily life:

“…in Kono
when they chop off people’s hands
we use tobacco leaf
to tie it round the wounded place.”

The rebels who had tried to overthrow the Sierra Leonean government were eventually defeated, but the country suffered tremendous losses. The testimonies – comprising hundreds of witness reports – deserved the attention of the international community, but that attention was limited. A number of poets from the West African sub-region have tried to rectify that by creating poems pertaining to the war. Among these, the most notable are Liberian American Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who has published several collections featuring poems about the two civil wars in neighboring Liberia, and Syl Cheney-Coker from Sierra Leone, whose 2008 collection contains compelling poems about the civil war in his homeland. Now, I have rendered the public transcripts into poetry to make a broader global community aware of the war’s impact and to underscore the twin truths of survivor suffering and resilience.

After I compiled this collection, I was faced with the task of identifying a publisher who would consider a book by a first-time author, the subject matter and genre of which were largely unfamiliar. I had a hunch that commercial publishers would not accept this book, but that a university press might. In spring 2019, I was blessed to contact Dr. Carmen R. Gillespie – poet, literary scholar, professor of English, founder and director of the Griot Institute for Africana Studies at Bucknell University, and editor of Griot Project Book series. She had a warm, encouraging attitude toward my proposal, and despite her sudden passing in August 2019, the book is now due out from Bucknell University Press in July 2021.

 As I sit here today reflecting on the results of the U.S. presidential election, my mind and heart go back to the many Sierra Leonean women, men, and children whose limbs, lives, and voices were taken from them as a punishment for exercising their right to vote for a civilian government and their refusal to support a rebel force that tried to rob them of that right:

 “Since you say you love a civil government
we are going to chop off your hands,
we will not let you go free.
If we don’t chop off your hands,
we’re going to kill you.”

After the war finally ended, Sierra Leoneans began the long, hard work of attempting to rebuild—and restore faith in—their society and country. That effort is ongoing in Sierra Leone as, indeed, it is in the United States and many other countries across the globe where rights have been violated and power abused. In August 2007, shortly before I left Freetown, millions of Sierra Leoneans all over the country braved long lines to vote in the first presidential election since the end of the long civil war. Those who had had one arm severed by the rebels voted with the other. Those who had been cruelly robbed of both arms voted with their toe-print. There is so much, so very much, that the world can learn from Sierra Leoneans’ determination to survive and to preserve or reclaim their dignity and human rights, including the right to vote and be counted.

University presses help make it possible to know about these stories, and to develop a keener alertness to the ways that language is used in public life: the kind of rhetoric that rationalizes aggression and the kind that serves to reduce it. If we strive to pay attention, we can discern truths that would otherwise slip away. Where do we locate the words to give voice to these truths? The words that we need might be anywhere. The words that we need might be everywhere. Listen. Read.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. Her collection of found poetry, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press in June 2021.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Found Poetry, Shanee Stepakoff, Sierra Leone, UP Week

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • …
  • 15
  • Next Page »

Archives

  • October 2022
  • June 2022
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • April 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • January 2014
  • November 2013
  • August 2013
  • April 2013
  • January 2013
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • September 2011
  • June 2011
  • March 2011
  • September 2010
  • October 2009

Recent Posts

  • A New Colophon for Bucknell University Press
  • Continued praise for Magical Realism and the History of Emotions in Latin America by Jerónimo Arellano
  • University Press Week Day 4
  • University Press Week Day 3
  • University Press Week Day 2

Archives

  • October 2022
  • June 2022
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • April 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • January 2014
  • November 2013
  • August 2013
  • April 2013
  • January 2013
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • September 2011
  • June 2011
  • March 2011
  • September 2010
  • October 2009

Bucknell University Press events calendar

February 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  
« Oct    

Topics

Handcrafted with on the Genesis Framework