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The Arts of Encounter uncovers the significant role of religious images in literature, offering a new approach to understanding Christian-Muslim relations in early modern Spain.
Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources – including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives’ testimonies, and paintings – Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual c...
Miguel de Cervantes’s experimentation with theatricality is frequently tied to the notion of revelation and disclosure of hidden truths. Drawing the Curtain showcases the elements of theatricality that characterize Cervantes’s prose and analyses the ways in which he uses theatricality in his own literary production. Bringing together the works of well-known scholars, who draw from a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, this collection demonstrates how Cervantes exploits revelation and disclosure to create dynamic dramatic moments that surprise and engage observers and readers. Hewing closely to Peter Brook’s notion of the bare or empty stage, Esther Fernández and Adrienne L. Martín argue that Cervantes’s omnipresent concern with theatricality manifests not only in his drama but also in the myriad metatheatrical instances dispersed throughout his prose works. In doing so, Drawing the Curtain sheds light on the ways in which Cervantes forces his readers to engage with themes that are central to his life and works, including love, freedom, truth, confinement, and otherness.
The epic poems written during the rise of Portugal and Spain on the global stage often dealt with topics quite unimaginable to the likes of Virgil or Homer. These poems reveal the astounding opportunities for upward social mobility and self-promotion afforded by broader access to print and the vast amount of knowledge and material wealth accrued through maritime exploration. Iberian poets of the period were quite cognizant of their ventures into uncharted territory, and that awareness informed their literary journeys. The War Trumpet features nine substantial essays that expand our understanding of Iberian Renaissance epic poetry by posing questions seldom raised in relation to poems such as...
The word "bibliophilia" indicates a love of books, both as texts to be read and objects to be cherished for their physical qualities. Throughout the history of Iberian print culture, bibliophiles have attempted to explain the psychological experiences of reading and collecting books, as well as the social and economic conditions of book production. Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians analyses Spanish bibliophiles who catalogue, organize, and archive books, as well as the publishers, artists, and writers who create them. Robert Richmond Ellis examines how books are represented in modern Spanish writing and how Spanish bibliophiles reflect on the role of books in their lives and in the histories and cultures of modern Spain. Through the combined approaches of literary studies, book history, and the book arts, Ellis argues that two strains of Spanish bibliophilia coalesce in the modern period: one that envisions books as a means of achieving personal fulfilment, and another that engages with politics and uses books to affirm linguistic, cultural, and regional and national identities.
The Ibero-American Baroque is an interdisciplinary, empirically-grounded contribution to the understanding of cultural exchanges in the early modern Iberian world.
Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya’s renowned print series The Disasters of War remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation. The Art of Witnessing provides a new account of Goya’s print series by taking readers through the forty-seven prints he dedicated to the violence of war. Drawing on facets of Goya’s artistry rarely considered together before, the book challenges the notion that documentary realism and historical testimony were his primary aims. Michael Iarocci argues that while the depiction of war’s atrocities was central to Goya’s project, the lasting power of the print series stems from the artist’s complex moral and aesthetic meditations on the subject. Making novel contributions to longstanding debates about historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, The Art of Witnessing tells a new story, print by print, to highlight the ways in which Goya’s masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.
“The Spanish Element in Our Nationality” delves beneath the traditional “English-only” narrative of U.S. history, using Spain’s participation in a series of international exhibitions to illuminate more fully the close and contested relationship between these two countries. Written histories invariably record the Spanish financing of Columbus’s historic voyage of 1492, but few consider Spain’s continuing influence on the development of U.S. national identity. In this book, M. Elizabeth Boone investigates the reasons for this problematic memory gap by chronicling a series of Spanish displays at international fairs. Studying the exhibition of paintings, the construction of ephemer...
Although it is fashionable among modernists to claim that globalism emerged only since ca. 1800, the opposite can well be documented through careful comparative and transdisciplinary studies, as this volume demonstrates, offering a wide range of innovative perspectives on often neglected literary, philosophical, historical, or medical documents. Texts, images, ideas, knowledge, and objects migrated throughout the world already in the pre-modern world, even if the quantitative level compared to the modern world might have been different. In fact, by means of translations and trade, for instance, global connections were established and maintained over the centuries. Archetypal motifs developed...