You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Israel Pelletier argues that "Trois contes" demands a different kind of reading which distinguishes it from "Madame Bovary" and other Flaubert texts. By the time he wrote this late work, Flaubert's attitude toward his characters and the role of fiction had changed to accommodate different social, political, and literary pressures. He constructed two opposing levels of meaning for each of the stories, straight and ironic, which produced a more fruitful way of addressing some of his concerns and assumptions about langauge and illusion. Included in this study are a provocative feminist reading of "Un Coeur," an assessment of "Saint Julien" as Flaubert's attempt to come to terms with his originality as a writer, and an interpretation of "Herodias" as an autobiography of the writing process.
None
Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.
In a study drawing on contemporary and 18th-century literary theory and philosophy, social history and history of the theatre, Hayes presents a reading of the dramas of Diderot and Sade and argues for a new understanding of the genre as a whole.
"In the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's most prolific and innovative nineteenth-century novelist, Hazel Gold finds the act of framing insistently at work. By exploring Galdós's methods of structuring and evaluating literary and historical experience, Gold illuminates the novelist's art and uncovers the far-reaching narratological, social, and epistemological implications of his framing stategies. A close look at Galdós's novels reveals the artist at pains to contain and interpret what he perceived to be the distinctive and oftening disheartening experience of bourgeois liberalism of his day. Looking beyond text to context, Gold examines the ways in which Galdós's work itself has been framed by readers and critics in accordance with changing allegiances to contemporary literary theory and the canon. The highly ambiguous status of the frame in Galdós's fiction confirms the author's own signal position as a writer poised at the limits between realism and modernity" --
This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Meteores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyere and Le Medianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.
This book collects essays which discuss women's representation of women and the war story in Latin American literature, looking in particular at their experiences, historical contexts, and their political and creative aims. This collection draws together for the first time a range of narratives of conflict and revolution as represented by Latin American women writers. By embracing a broad definition of conflict and by engaging with a wide range of narratives of conflict, it provides a space for multiple and complex versions of subjectivity, writing and experience-in-conflict to co-exist.
This volume presents an overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of women's studies, including original essays by pioneering scholars as well as by younger specialists. New pathfinding models of theoretical analysis are balanced with a careful revisiting of the historical foundations of women's studies.
Criticism of La Regenta has until recently focused on the text's plot as an extraordinarily coherent and convincing fictional world. Stephanie A. Sieburth demonstrates that the devices which produce order in the text are counterbalanced by an equally strong tendency toward entropy of meaning. The narrator is shown to be duplicitous and unreliable in his judgments on characters and events. Without an omniscient narrator, readers must interpret for themselves the complex intertextual structure of the novel. Saints' lives, honor plays, and serial novels each provide partial reflections of Ana Ozores' story. The text becomes a collage of mutually reflecting segments which, like Ana in her moments of self-doubt and madness, ultimately question the function of language and of any overriding interpretation or meaning.
Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made Corín Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain’s Barbara Cartland or France’s Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.