Richly researched and engagingly written, Political Affairs of the Heart traces the emergence of female sentimental travel writing in late eighteenth-century Britain, and posits its centrality to women’s engagement with national and gender politics. This study examines four travel narratives written by women between 1774 and 1795, convincingly arguing that they effectively deploy the discourse of sensibility to engage with debates around Britain’s national identity during the French and American Revolutions. Van Netten Blimke contends that Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—which first introduced sentimental discourse to the travelogue—facilitated women’s gradual inclusion into this previously male-dominated genre, effectively paving the way for women to influence the country’s sociopolitical transformation. These four previously understudied works successfully combine eyewitness authority with the language of sensibility to mount impassioned interventions in their nation’s perception and practice of revolutionary politics, at a time when its national identity was most in flux.

In its early transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975, Spain rapidly embraced neoliberal practices and policies, some of which directly impacted cultural production. In a few short years, the country commercialized its art and literary markets, investing in “cultural tourism” as a tool for economic growth and urban renewal. The artist novel began to proliferate for the first time in a century, but these novels—about artists and art historians—have received little critical attention beyond the descriptive. In Between Market and Myth, Vater studies select authors—Julio Llamazares, Ángeles Caso, Clara Usón, Almudena Grandes, Nieves Herrero, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, and Enrique Vila-Matas—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.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.