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Little attention has been paid to Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983) as a modernist writer. This study addresses the relationship of her production with Catalan, Spanish, and European modernism. Foregrounded is Rodoreda's negotiation of the overlapping subjects of gender, class, modes of representation, and national identities. In the first three chapters her pre-Civil War novels Soc una dona honrada?, Un dia de la vida d'un home, and Del que hom no pot fugir are read against key Catalan texts, particularly Eugeni d'Ors', to emphasize debates surrounding modernist aesthetics and models of Catalan national identity. The modernist preoccupation with high versus low literature is developed in Aloma, while El carrer de les Camelies reconfigures the flaneur vis-a-vis the female writer's positioning in the modernist enterprise. The modernist debt to realism and the revindication of early Catalan modernism in the 1970s are examined in Mirall trencat. Christine Arkinstall is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at The University of Auckland.
The volume gives an excellent overall view of Rodoreda's poetry in the original and in translation, her short stories and novels. A completely annotated, cross-indexed bibliography of the critical work on Rodoreda, accompanied by an analysis of the current state of criticism on her work is included.
The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to bring together critical and comparative approaches to the emergent field of neerlandophone postcolonial studies. The collection of essays ranges across the cultures and literatures of the Netherlands and Belgium and establishes an encounter between postcolonial theoretical discourses from both within and without the region. Each one of the contributions puts under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perceptions of the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, as lying outside or to the side of the postcolonial domain. In the Low Countries, local ...
The authors studied, born between 1867 and l966, evince an interest in one or more of the issues that structure and give unity to this book: the construction of the self, concepts of gender and nation, center and margin, and efforts to recover and/or reconstruct the past, both individual and collective. In addition to focusing on questions that are currently of great critical interest, the volume features both Castilian and Catalan authors.
The second section contains ten critical essays that apply widely varying critical approaches that range from feminist, psycho-analytical, formalist, poststructuralist, new historical, and intertextual to postmodern and postcolonial. The volume also features Riera's hitherto unpublished play in the Catalan original and in English translation. This book will appeal to those interested in twentieth-century Peninsular literature, comparative literature, feminist criticism, gender studies, and cultural studies.
While the fin de siècle has received considerable attention as a critical concept, the first decade of a new century has been less well studied. The chapters in this volume consider the distinctive cultural significance of the ‘noughties’ in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, looking at the specific cultural, political and economic circumstances of the decade, and in some cases proposing notions of an identifiable ‘noughties sensibility’ or ‘noughties generation’ which may flow out of, or stand in reaction against, the malaise of the fin de siècle. Drawing on specialist, area-specific knowledge, the authors consider the significance of the noughties across different eras. The co...
Women's Narrative and Film in 20th Century Spain examines the development of the feminine cultural tradition in spain and how this tradition reshaped and defined a Spanish national identity. Each chapter focuses on representation of autobiography, alienation and exile, marginality, race, eroticism, political activism, and feminism within the ever-changing nationalisms in different regions of Spain. The book describes how concepts of gender and difference shaped the individual, collective, and national identities of Spanish women and significantly modified the meaning and representation of female sexuality.
Silvia Roig explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the 20th century. Aurora Bertrana's works are almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Her rich, intellectual work has not received the attention it deserves, relegated almost to absolute oblivion. The author reviews and studies twenty-four of Bertrana's novels written in Catalan andSpanish, including: Ariatea (1960), El pomell de les violes (MS), L'inefable Philip (MS), La aldea sin hombres (mn.), La madrecita de los cerdos (MS), Entre dos silencis (1958), La ninfa d'argila (1959), Fracàs (1966) and La ciutat dels jo...
"Writers, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Quim Monzâo or Cristina Fernâandez Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel, has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own. This volume re-edits and expands ...
This study explores the interaction of language, culture and identity in contemporary Catalonia and rejects the exclusion of Castilian as a language capable of expressing 'Catalan-ness'. This study, charting the construction of a Catalan identity from the nineteenth-century cultural renaissance until the present day, explores the interaction of language, culture and identity in contemporary Catalonia. Drawing on postcolonial and multicultural literary theories, it argues that Castilian- and Catalan-language narratives are expressions of the same culture. Through detailed analyses of texts by Terenci Moix, Francisco Candel, Ignasi Riera, Montserrat Roig, Juan Marsé, Ramon Pallicé, and Manue...