You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Essays on Iberian views of the age of conquest through literature and cinema
An eminent historian’s biography of one of Mexico’s most prominent statesmen, thinkers, and writers Lucas Alamán (1792–1853) was the most prominent statesman, political economist, and historian in nineteenth-century Mexico. Alamán served as the central ministerial figure in the national government on three occasions, founded the Conservative Party in the wake of the Mexican-American War, and authored the greatest historical work on Mexico’s struggle for independence. Though Mexican historiography has painted Alamán as a reactionary, Van Young’s balanced portrait draws upon fifteen years of research to argue that Alamán was a conservative modernizer, whose north star was always economic development and political stability as the means of drawing Mexico into the North Atlantic world of advanced nation-states. Van Young illuminates Alamán’s contribution to the course of industrialization, advocacy for scientific development, and unerring faith in private property and institutions such as church and army as anchors for social stability, as well as his less commendable views, such as his disdain for popular democracy.
Critical Dictionary of Mexican Literature (1955-2010) is both a personal anthology and a highly subjective and unscientific reference work, marrying the often acerbic, always poetic reviews and essays written on Mexican literature by renowned critic Christopher Domínguez Michael over the past thirty years to the quixotic ideal of a comprehensive dictionary of Mexico's recent literary history. With well over 150 entries, the Dictionary both introduces and interrogates the work of novelists, poets, essayists, and journalists working in Mexico between 1955 (date of the publication of Juan Rulfo's watershed Mexican Revolution novel Pedro Páramo) and the present day.
Capitalism and its Discontents presents a series of interpretative essays on a number of key modern and contemporary Latin American novels and films. The overarching theme in the essays is the relation between such textual materials and their regional contexts.
This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.
The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon continues as he searches for his roots through tangled childhood memories of a haunting family tragedy International Latino Book Award Winner * Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon’s eponymous wanderer travels to Poland, Italy, the U.S., and the Guatemalan countryside in search of secrets he can barely name. He follows memory’s strands back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to the contradictory, forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family, specifically surrounding the long-ago childhood death by drowning of his uncle Salomón. But what, or who, really killed Salomón? As he goes deeper, he realizes that the truth lies buried in his own past, in the brutal Guatemala of the 1970s and his subsequent exile to the American South. Mourning is a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and loss.
Many scholars assert that Mexico’s complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico...
This book is a detailed study of salient examples of Mexican travel writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While scholars have often explored the close relationship between European or North American travel writing and the discourse of imperialism, little has been written on how postcolonial subjects might relate to the genre. This study first traces the development of a travel-writing tradition based closely on European imperialist models in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. It then goes on to analyse how the narrative techniques of postmodernism and the political agenda of postcolonialism might combine to help challenge the genre's imperialist tendencies in late twentieth-century works of travel writing, focusing in particular on works by writers Juan Villoro, Héctor Perea and Fernando Solana Olivares.
María José Falcón y Tella invites us on a fascinating journey through the world of law and literature, travelling through the different eras and exploring eternal and as such current issues such as justice, power, resistance, vengeance, rights, and duties. This is an unending conversation, which brings us back to Sophocles and Dickens, Cervantes and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Melville, among many others. There are many ways to approach the concept of “Law and Literature”. In the classical manner, the author distinguishes three paths: the Law of Literature, involving a technical approach to the literary theme; Law as Literature, a hermeneutical and rhetorical approach to examining legal texts; and finally, Law in Literature, which is undoubtedly the most fertile and documented perspective (the fundamental part of the work focusses on this direction). This timely volume offers an introduction to this enormous field of study, which was born in the United States over a century ago and is currently taking root in the European continent.
Pourquoi penser le biographique? N'est-il pas épuisé? Le siècle passé semble l'avoir vidé de son contenu et de sa substance et l'a réduit à un état d'affaiblissement presque complet dans le domaine des sciences sociales comme dans celui de la critique littéraire. L'enjeu de cet ouvrage est d'affirmer que le biographique déborde la biographie et de considérer le biographique comme une condition du retour de la biographie au moyen de son dépassement. Cet ouvrage rassemble des travaux abordant ...