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At the turn of the century, Armando Palacio Valdes (1853-1938) enjoyed the reputation of being one of Spain's leading novelists. Widely translated into other languages, he was hailed enthusiastically by such foreign critics as Edmund Gosse and William Dean Howells. In the twentieth century, he was regarded as a "safe" novelist, the paladin of middle-class Catholic virtues. Recently, however, his novels are again attracting interest in Spain. In Spain's Forgotten Novelist, Brian J. Dendle critically examines Palacio Valdes's career and reputation, casting doubt on his benign image and veracity, and establishing that the sales of Palacio Valdes's books in translation were much less than the author claimed.
Darwinian theory - the big idea of the nineteenth century - and its impact on the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós. Despite the fact that Darwinian theory was perhaps the big idea of the nineteenth century, most critics in the past have assumed that Benito Pérez Galdós would have remained unaffected by this scientific and philosophical revolution. This work contends otherwise, charting the influence of evolutionary theories on Galdós throughout his literary career. From his adaptation of the early nineteenth-century costumbristas' depiction of social species into a more sophisticated portrayal of Madrid society to his treatment of shifting social forces at a time of major socio-economic c...
This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws ...
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Jigsaw puzzles' notorious complexity and mega-multiple, amorphously-shaped pieces provide an appropriate metaphor for the navigating and maneuvering necessary throughout all aspects of human dynamics. Involvement comprises not only efforts by an individual personally trying to fit together a life of relationships with Family, Friends & Foes within complex categories and different levels, but the efforts by groups of individuals within those categories, progressively, by those groups within a larger society and/or societies, and then, across so many so-called boundaries: geographic, ethnic, linguistic, artistic and more. Such is the starting point for this particular collection of essays, whi...
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.
Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century is an exploration of the general concept of “Spanishness” as all things related to Spain, specifically as the multiple meanings of “Spanishness” and the different ways of being Spanish are depicted in 20th-21st century literary and cinematic fiction of Spain. This book also represents a call for a re-evaluation of what being Spanish means not just in post-Franco Spain but also in the Spain of the new millennium. The reader will find treatments of some of the crucial themes in Spanish culture such as immigration, nationalisms, and affiliation with the European Union as well as many others of contemporary relevance such as time, memory, and women studies that defy exclusivist and clear-cut single notions of Spanishness. These explorations will help contextualize what it means to be Spanish in present day Spain and in the light of globalization while also dissipating stereotypical notions of Spain and Spanishness.
British culture of the Romantic period is distinguished by a protracted and varied interest in things Spanish. The climax in the publication of fictional, and especially poetical, narratives on Spain corresponds with the intense phase of Anglo-Iberian exchanges delimited by the Peninsular War (1808-14), on the one hand, and the Spanish experiment of a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1820 until 1823, on the other. Although current scholarship has uncovered and reconstructed several foreign maps of British Romanticism - from the Orient to the South Seas - exotic European geographies have not received much attention. Spain, in particular, is one of the most neglected of these 'imaginar...
Philosophers have contemplated the meaning of life, the who & the why, since nascent self-consciousness of the evolving hominid species. Yet practical efforts, i.e., control of life, have always transcended the philosophical: how to dominate what happens to the physical body itself, how to control the environment, and the interaction therefrom. Thus are born rites, rituals & religions. A rite can be a prescribed religious or other solemn ceremony or act it can be a social custom or practice, or even a mundane conventional act. A ritual can be the established form for a ceremony, the order of words used for example; a ritual observance can be either a system of ceremonial acts or actions, or ...
The dispassionate intellectual examination of the concepts of death & dying contrasts dramatically with the emotive grieving process experienced by those who mourn. Death & dying are binary concepts in human cultures. Cultural differences reveal their mutual exclusiveness in philosophical outlook, language, and much more. Other sets of binaries come into play under intellectual consideration and emotive behavior, which further divide and shape perceptions, beliefs, and actions of individuals and groups. The presence or absence of religious beliefs about life and death, and disposition of the body and/or soul, are prime distinctions. Likewise the age-old binary of reason vs. faith. To many ob...