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Beneath the Fiction : The Contrary Worlds of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares
Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares rival Don Quijote in complexity and significance. This book analyzes all twelve novelas, seeking to illuminate the inherent tensions between the usually affirmative resolutions and lessons proposed by Cervantes's narrators, on the one hand, and the inescapable socio-cultural dissonances and ironies of story and language, on the other. This reading of the entire collection reveals the richness and complexity of many of the less-studied novelas as well as the striking modernity (or postmodernity) of the final text.
Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200-1750
Beyond Sight, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, explores the ways in which Iberian writers crafted images of both Old and New Worlds using the non-visual senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch). The contributors argue that the uses of these senses are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers from the pre- and early modern periods. Medievalists delve into the poetic interiorizations of the sensorial plane to show how sacramental and purportedly miraculous sensory experiences were central to the effort of affirming faith and understanding indigenous peoples in the Americas. Renaissance and early modernist essays shed new light on experiences of pungent, bustling ports and city centres, and the exotic musical performances of empire. This insightful collection covers a wide array of approaches including literary and cultural history, philosophical aesthetics, affective and cognitive studies, and theories of embodiment. Beyond Sightexpands the field of sensory studies to focus on the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies from historical, literary, and cultural perspectives.
Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain
The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spaincontests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain's most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaulahad a notorious appeal for female audiences, and the early modern authors who borrowed from it varied in their reactions to its large cast of literate female characters. Don Quixoteand other works that situate women as readers carry the influence of Amadísforward into the modern novel. When early modern authors read chivalric romance, they also read gender, harnessing the female characters of the source text to a variety of political and aesthetic purposes.
Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature
Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment. It goes on to examine concrete representations of deviant female characters, focusing on the figures of syphilitic prostitutes and physically decayed aged women in literary texts such as Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. Finally, an analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women's disability. By expanding the meanings of contemporary theories of materiality and the social construction of disability, the book concludes that paradoxically, femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterized the new literary heroes at the very time Spain was at the apex of its imperial power. Ultimately, as this study shows, the broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of power and established truths.
Discursive Renovatio in Lope de Vega and Calderón
This volume presents a new approach to Spanish Baroque drama, inspired by Foucauldian discourse archeology, whose rare fusion of meticulous philology and ambitious theory will be exciting and fruitful both for specialists of Spanish literature and for anyone invested in the history of European thought. Detailed readings are dedicated to some of the most prominent plays by Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, both autos sacramentales (El viaje del alma; El divino Orfeo; La lepra de Constantino) and comedias (El castigo sin venganza; El príncipe constante; El médico de su honra). The "archeological" perspective cast on the plays implies an integration of their discourse-historical "foils", from pagan antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as a discussion of related discourses, mainly theological, philosophical and historiographical. A separate "excursus" suggests a reconsideration of the common manner in which the discursive relation between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque is conceptualized.
Fighting Windmills : Encounters with Don Quixote
Cervantes' Don Quixote is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. In Fighting Windmills Manuel Dur#65533;n and Fay R. Rogg offer a beautifully written excursion into Cervantes' great novel and trace its impact on writers and thinkers across centuries and continents. How did Cervantes write such a rich tale? Dur#65533;n and Rogg explore the details of Cervantes' life, the techniques with which he constructed the novel, and the central themes of the adventures of Don Quixote and his earthy squire Sancho Panza. The authors then provide an insightful, panoramic view of Cervantes' powerful influence on generations of writers as diverse as Descartes, Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, and Borges.
In Her Words : Critical Studies on Gloria Fuertes
During her lifetime Gloria Fuertes achieved the status of a controversial cultural icon, both through her poetry for adults and through her poetry, recorded readings, and television programs for juveniles. This collection of lively essays, by authors who specialize in contemporary Spanish poetry, approaches the works of Gloria Fuertes from various theoretical and critical perspectives. In Her Words speaks to the inherent complexity of Gloria Fuertes's poetry, as manifested in its ultimate indeterminacy and undecidability, yet attest to this poet's abiding value as the voice of the marginalized-women, the poor, children, all the invisible members of society- who were silenced during the years of Spanish dictatorship under Franco.
The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes
Frequent and complex representations of jealousy in early modern Spanish literature offer symbolically rich and often contradictory images. Steven Wagschal examines these occurrences by illuminating the theme of jealousy in the plays of Lope de Vega, the prose of Miguel de Cervantes, and the complex poetry of Luis de Góngora. Noting the prevalence of this emotion in their work, he reveals what jealousy offered these writers at a time when Spain was beginning its long decline. Wagschal examines jealousy not only in canonical texts--The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura, The Commanders of Cordoba--but also in less-studied writings such as Lope de Vega's Jealous Arminda and In Love but Discreet and Góngora's "What of the Tall Envious Mountains." Through close analysis of numerous works, read in relation to one another, he demonstrates how the rhetorical elaboration of jealousy is linked to the ideological makeup of the texts--complicating issues of race, class, gender, morality, epistemology, and aesthetics--and proposes that the theme of jealousy offered a means for working through political and cultural problems involving power. Grounding his study in the work of thinkers ranging from Vives and Descartes to Freud and DeSousa, Wagschal also draws on classical antiquity to unravel myths that impinge upon the texts he considers. By showing that the greatest hyperbole of each of these writers is a representation of jealousy, he calls for a reconsideration of an era's literary giants, arguing not only for a reinterpretation of settled views on Cervantes but also for a reconsideration of Góngora's role in the development of modern European aesthetics. With its fresh insights into the interrelationships among literature, art, and society, Wagschal's study offers background theory for analyzing the emotions in literature and is the first book to treat an emotion in any national literature from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of mind. With its cogent insights into the jealous mind, it raises issues relevant both to the early modern period and to our contemporary world.
Madness, Love and Tragedy in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Spain
How do Spanish writers of the 19th and 20th century define and represent madness, a basic and controversial aspect of world culture, and how do the different conceptions of madness intersect with love, religion, politics, and other literary themes in Spanish society? This multi-author book analyzes the theme of madness in formative masterpieces of Spanish literature of the 19th and 20th century through the use of relevant critical and theoretical approaches. In this context, authors studied in this book include Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas Clarin, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Caterina Albert, Benito Perez Galdos, Miguel de Unamuno, and Juan Goytisolo, among others.
Miguel de Unamuno's Quest for Faith
Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) was a extraordinary Spanish thinker, a philosopher, linguist, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, professor, university administrator, and Spanish public intellectual. He had great intellectual integrity and moral courage.Unamuno is not an easy philosopher to read. He loved paradoxes and even (at times) contradictions. Various interpreters have called him an atheist, a sceptic, a Protestant, a pantheist, a Catholic modernist, and a good Catholic. Passages can be found in his writings that can be taken to support all of these interpretations. In the present book, Jan E. Evans does an incisive and thorough job of sorting through the Unamuno corpus and arriving at a definitive interpretation of his views. One great asset of Evans' work is the insight she gains by comparing Unamuno's works with the philosophers whom he admired most and considered his fellow travellers in the tragic sense of life. These include Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), William James (1842-1910), and especially Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).This book examines the life and work of Unamuno through the lens of his faith. Those who are not familiar with Unamuno will find here a clear exposition of the most important themes in the thinker's work along with a framework through which one can profitably begin to read theprimary texts.
Rain Forest Literatures : Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture
Native texts of the Amazonian rain forest have been viewed as myth or ethnographic matter-the raw material of literature-rather than as significant works in their own right. But in this unprecedented study, Lzcia Sa approaches indigenous texts as creative works rather than source material. Disclosing the existence and nature of longstanding, rich, and complex Native American literary and intellectual traditions that have typically been neglected or demeaned by literary criticism, Rain Forest Literatures analyzes four indigenous cultural traditions: the Carib, Tupi-Guarani, Upper Rio Negro, and Western Arawak. In each case, Sa considers principal native texts and, where relevant, their publication history. She offers a historical overview of the impact of these texts on mainstream Spanish-American and Brazilian literatures, detailing comparisons with native sources and making close analyses of major instances, such as Mario de Andrade's classic Macunaima (1928) and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller (1986). A redrawing of the lineage of Brazilian and Spanish-American literatures, this book advocates an understanding of the relationships between cultures as a process of "transculturation" rather than "acculturation"-a process that emphasizes the often-ignored impact of the peripheral culture on the one that assumes dominance. Lzcia Sa is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University.
Spanish Women's Writing, 1849-1996
Traces a long tradition of Spanish women's writing from the end of the Romantic period until today. The book studies the major authors within the changing political, cultural and economic context of women's lives over the past 150 years. Particular attention is paid to women's versions of female subjectivity in relation to the Spanish nation-state, government politics, and the women's liberation movement.
Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain
Staging Marriage in Early Modern Spain examines selected dramatic works where the vicissitudes of matrimony play center stage. Various aspects of conjugal relations including courtship, divorce, and widowhood take on particular relevance in the Spanish comedia in light of the intense debates raging over the "seventh sacrament" in early modern Europe. The institution of matrimony is subject to unprecedented scrutiny during this period and provides a rich source of material for playwrights such as Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Taking the decrees on marriage of the Council of Trent (1563) as a point of departure, Carrión examines the conjugal bond within a literary and historical framework, offering close readings of dramatic works, religious decrees, and moral treatises where the conjugal bond plays a central role. She identifies in works such as Lope's Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, Cervantes' El juez de los divorcios, and Calderón's El medico de su honra the emergence of more modern perspectives on marriage. One of the central questions this study raises is the degree to which the dramatic works of early modern Spain conform to the morality espoused by the treatises that defined marriage at the time. While the tone of prescriptive discourses contrasts with the lyrical voices of the Spanish stage, both reveal a number of inherent-and compelling-contradictions in their views of the conjugal bond.
The Subject in Question : Early Contemporary Spanish Literature and Modernism
The Subject in Question presents the first systematic study of Spanish modernism in an attempt to end Spain's literary isolation from the mainstream of early contemporary European literature. Traditionally, Spanish literature has been approached by the literary generational model, an ultranationalist perspective that separates Spanish writing from its larger European modernist context. C. Christopher Soufas argues against further adherence to the generational groupings, establishing instead solid criteria for embracing the period category of modernism as a more appropriate model. Offering a refreshing and original approach, Soufas studies various key works from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain to demonstrate their important modernist characteristics. He considers the evolution of modernism in all the major genres beginning with novels by such authors as Pio Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, Ramon Gomez
The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000
Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000 addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambitiousness of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Jonathan Mayhew first offers a critical analysis of the called 'poetry of experience' of Luis García Montero, a tendency that is based on the supposed obsolescence of the modernist poetics of the first half of the century. While the 'poetry of experience' presents itself as a progressive attempt to 'normalise' poetry, to make it accessible to the common reader, Mayhew views it as a reactionary move that ultimately reduces poetry to the status of a minor genre. The author then turns his attention to the poetry of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, whose poetry embodies the continuation of modernism, and to the work of younger women poets of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout this controversial and provocative book, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the larger culture and society. It turns out that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics is still highly relevant even in an age in which more cynical views of literature seem prevalent. Ultimately, Mayhew writes as an advocate for the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age.
Deep Song : The Life and Work of Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) is perhaps Spain's most famous writer and cultural icon. By the age of thirty, he had become the most successful member of a brilliant generation of poets, winning critical and popular acclaim by fusing traditional and avant-garde themes and techniques. He would go on to reinvent Spanish theater too, writing bold, experimental, and often shocking plays that dared openly to explore both female and homosexual desire. A vibrant and mercurial personality, by the time Lorca visited Argentina in late 1933, he had become the most celebrated writer and cultural figure in the Spanish-speaking world. But Lorca's fame could not survive politics: his identification with the splendor of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36) was one of the reasons behind Lorca's murder in August 1936 at the hands of right-wing insurgents at the start of the Spanish Civil War. In this biography, Stephen Roberts seeks out the roots of the man and his work in the places in which Lorca lived and died: the Granadan countryside where he spent his childhood; the Granada and Madrid of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s where he received his education and achieved success as a writer; his influential visits to Catalonia, New York, Cuba, and Argentina; and the mountains outside Granada where his body still lies in an undiscovered grave. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of a complex and brilliant man as well as new insight into the works that helped to make his name.
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The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes
Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) is one of the classic texts of Western literature and the foundation of European fiction. Yet Cervantes himself remains an enigmatic figure. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, first published in 2002, offers a comprehensive treatment of Cervantes' life and work, including his lesser known writing. The essays, by some of the most outstanding scholars in the field, cover the historical and political context of Cervantes' writing, his place in Renaissance culture, and the role of his masterpiece, Don Quixote, in the formation of the modern novel. They draw on contemporary critical perspectives to shed new light on Cervantes' work, including the 'Exemplary Novels', the plays and dramatic interludes, and the long romances, Galatea and Persiles. The volume provides useful supporting material for students; suggestions for further reading, a detailed chronology, a complete list of his published writings, an overview of translations and editions, and a guide to electronic resources.
The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature
This is the first comprehensive history of Spanish literature to be published in English since the 1970s. It brings together experts from the USA, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Together, the essays cover the full range of Spanish poetry, prose, and theatre from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The classics of the canon of eleven centuries of Spanish literature are covered, from Berceo, Cervantes and Calderón to García Lorca and Martín Gaite, but attention is also paid to lesser known writers and works. The chapters chart a wide range of literary periods and movements. The volume concludes with a consideration of the influences of film and new media on modern Spanish literature. This invaluable book contains an introduction, more than fifty substantial chapters, a chronology (covering key events in history, literature, and art), a bibliography, and a comprehensive index for easy reference.
Cervantes
-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
Spain and the Western Tradition
The late Renaissance in Spain was a period of progressive military, diplomatic and social defeat, and the spirit of the Spaniards, moving from confidence to doubt, reflected a growing disillusion with grandeur. After an examination of optimism and pessimism in terms of the baroque period, Professor Green discusses 'desengaño' - dillusion - as a related and prevalent factor. In its positive aspect, disillusion was a form of wisdom, that the Stoic Sapiens who was fully aware of what constituted the supreme good and was enticed by nothing else. The factors are apparent in the Spanish attitude toward death. When he writes in seriousness, the Spaniard of the baroque period recognises death the obedient executor of the will of a just and merciful God. Thus, the concept of the Spanish seventeenth century as one of total despair collapses in the presence of the evidence adduced. Far removed from attitudes of despondency, the originality of Spain's literary accomplishments reached full tide in the baroque period, a literary age characterized by the growth of a new sophistication. The use of brilliant metaphor, of allegory, of double and triple meanings of words to form bridges of intellectual association, is the result of a consistent growth that developed inevitably from the Renaissance style.
Spanish Literature : A Very Short Introduction
Spanish literature has given the world the figures of Don Quixote and Don Juan, and is responsible for the "invention" of the novel in the 16th century. The medieval period produced literature in Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, and today there is a flourishing literature in Catalan, Galician, and Basque as well as in Castilian--the language that has became known as "Spanish." Moreover, a multilayered history of exile has produced a transnational literary output, while writers in Spain have engaged with European cultural trends. This Very Short Introduction explores this rich literary history, which resonates with contemporary debates on transnationalism and cultural diversity. The book sheds much light on the ways in which Spanish literature has been read, in and outside Spain, explaining misconceptions, outlining the insights of recent scholarship, and suggesting new readings. It highlights the precocious modernity of much early modern Spanish literature, and shows how the gap between modern ideas and social reality stimulated creative literary responses in subsequent periods and how contemporary writers have adjusted to Spain's recent accelerated modernisation.
The Woman in Latin American and Spanish Literature
Noted scholars of Latin American and Spanish literature here explore the literary history of Latin America through the representation of iconic female characters. Focusing both on canonical novels and on works virtually unknown outside their original countries, the essays discuss the important ways in which these characters represent nature, history, race and sex, the effects of globalization, and the unknowable ""other."" They examine how both male and female writers portray Latin American women, reinterpreting the dynamics between the genders across boundaries and historical periods. Supported by recent theories in literary criticism, gender, and Latin American studies, this compendium provides a deep understanding of the role of women as conduits for the appreciation of their countries and cultures.
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