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The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.
The theatrum mundi metaphor was well-known in the Golden Age, and was often employed, notably by Calderón in his religious theatre. However, little account has been given of the everyday exploitation of the idea of the world as stage in the mainstream drama of the Golden Age. This study examines how and why playwrights of the period time and again created characters who dramatize themselves, who re-invent themselves by performing new roles and inventing new plots within the larger frame of the play. The prevalence of metatheatrical techniques among Golden Age dramatists, including Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca and Guillén de Castro, reveals a fascination with role-playing and its implications. Thacker argues that in comedy, these playwrights saw role-playing as a means by which they could comment on and criticize the society in which they lived, and he reveals a drama far less supportive of the social status quo in Golden Age Spain than has been traditionally thought to be the case.
"The bringing of Spanish seventeenth-century verse plays to the contemporary English-speaking stage involves a number of fundamental questions. Are verse translations preferable to prose, and if so, what kind of verse? To what degree should translations aim to be 'faithful'? Which kinds of plays 'work', and which do not? Which values and customs of the past present no difficulties for contemporary audiences, and which need to be decoded in performance?Which kinds of staging are suitable, and which are not? To what degree, if any, should one aim for 'authenticity' in staging? In this volume, a group of translators, directors, and scholars explores these and related questions."--Jacket
Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons--Hercules and King Sebastian--are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554-78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land's charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The hybrid ...
Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.
The noble wives in María de Zayas's Desengaños suffer terrible fates: one is beheaded, another poisoned, one is cemented into a chimney, while yet another is locked into a tiny wall closet where she dies. The hallmark of Zayas's aesthetics, these characters are the central reason why her fiction has increased in popularity through the ages. Yet their stories pose an apparent contradiction between the author's pro-female rhetoric and her gusto for killing model women, then beautifying their mutilated cadavers. Dressed to Kill reconciles Zayas's Desengaños with the age in which it was written, contextualizing the book in baroque poetics, the Spanish honour code, and fifteenth-century martyr saints' lives. Elizabeth Rhodes elegantly uncovers Zayas's intention to reform the Spanish nobility by displaying noble misbehaviour and its deadly consequences. Her book concludes by detailing the Desengaños' intriguing influence on the aesthetic base of Gothic literature by revealing that its authors were avid readers of Zayas.
This book examines the institutional contexts of dramaturgical practices in the changing political landscape of 20th century Germany. Through wide-ranging case studies, it discusses the way in which operationalised modes of action, legal frameworks and an established profession have shaped dramaturgical practice and thus links to current debates around the “institutional turn” in theatre and performance studies. German theatre represents a rich and well-chosen field as it is here where the role of the dramaturg was first created and where dramaturgy played a significantly politicised role in the changing political systems of the 20th century. The volume represents an important addition to a growing field of work on dramaturgy by contributing to a historical contextualisation of current practice. In doing so, it understands dramaturgy not only as a process which occurs in rehearsal rooms and writers’ studies, but one that has far wider institutional and political implications.
Drawing on the groundbreaking Spanish scholarship and editions of earlier generations and relying on research conducted in Spanish archives, this pioneering group of English-speaking scholars offers a new treatment of familiar material. The editors yoke together widely varying critical practices, including incisive New Critical readings and far-reaching explorations that draw on the most current European critical thought. In addition to these more strictly literary studies, there are interdisciplinary essays focusing on seventeenth- and twentieth-century reception and the social makeup of the comedia audience. The whole thus presents a balanced picture of the many ways in which the comedia can be viewed, and the contributors complement each other's work in often surprising ways, illuminating the same corpus from a number of perspectives.
With the rise of nationalism, and with it the nation-state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so arose new polemical issues. As the Spanish Empire expanded in the sixteenth century, theologians, jurists, artists and politicians commented on the morality and legitimacy of the imperial enterprise. With the increase in power of successive Spanish sovereigns from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip II (1556–98), followed by the decadence of the state through the reign of Charles II (1665–1700), political participants and observers alike put their thoughts on paper for mass dissemination. The study of epic poetry, poetry, drama, novels, rhetoric, imperial administrative documents and relig...