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Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.
Felipe Valencia examines the construction of lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sings of and perpetrates symbolic violence against the feminine and the female beloved in key texts of Spanish poetry from 1580 to 1620.
Many claim the contemporary world lacks empathy, this being the reason for all the atrocities in it. When thinking about the perpetrators of such brutalities, it is easy to assume they cannot acknowledge others as their equals. But is a lack of empathy a prerequisite for becoming a criminal? Would empathy then be preemptive of murder? When something terrible happens, we may be tempted to look for the source of violence exclusively in the criminals. However, when talking about human beings and the motives for their actions, one has to delve deeper. In Simon Stephens’s Pornography and David Greig’s The Events, two different crimes against humanity are portrayed. The aim of this book is to analyse the way in which the perpetrators are depicted in each play and whether the audience is asked to challenge the initial impulse to dehumanise them. Will the multifaceted nature of empathy be explored to the extent of debunking the myth of its simplicity?
Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism explores inter-disciplinary connections across Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, and feminist literary criticism to develop a theoretical framework for spatial criticism. Using the spatial gynocritics framework developed in the book, it analyzes selected texts from five different genres–short-story, novel, film, cartoons, and OTT series, created by women. The creators discussed in the book constitute a transnational collectivity of women that shares common concerns about gender, environment, technology, and social hierarchies. They comprise a geographically and linguistically diverse group from India, Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, and the U...
Cross-cultural encounters in Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the potential for bafflement, hostility, and admiration. The court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and were forced to make sense of one another. By looking at these interactions, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere. Both individual agents and objects such as texts and paintings helped mediate encounters between courts, which possessed rules and conventions that required decipherment and translation, whether in words o...
Due to the long presence of Muslims in Islamic territories (Al-Andalus and Granada) and of Muslims minorities in the Christians parts, the Iberian Peninsula provides a fertile soil for the study of the Qur’an and Qur’an translations made by both Muslims and Christians. From the mid-twelfth century to at least the end of the seventeenth, the efforts undertaken by Christian scholars and churchmen, by converts, by Muslims (both Mudejars and Moriscos) to transmit, interpret and translate the Holy Book are of the utmost importance for the understanding of Islam in Europe. This book reflects on a context where Arabic books and Arabic speakers who were familiar with the Qur’an and its exegesis coexisted with Christian scholars. The latter not only intended to convert Muslims, and polemize with them but also to adquire solid knowledge about them and about Islam. Qur’ans were seized during battle, bought, copied, translated, transmitted, recited, and studied. The different features and uses of the Qur’an on Iberian soil, its circulation as well as the lives and works of those who wrote about it and the responses of their audiences, are the object of this book.
Behind every crime novel there is a family. The author’s, the hero’s (or the heroine’s), and that of the villains themselves. Some families organise themselves into crime syndicates, controlling drugs, prostitution and illegal gambling. Others are simply dysfunctional, tearing themselves apart, fathers against sons, mothers against daughters, sisters against brothers, husbands against wives. Not everyone escapes alive. However, families do not exist in a vacuum. They are an important part of our society—for many, one of its most essential building blocks. That being said, society itself can impinge disastrously on personal relationships. War, that greatest of crimes, leaves children bereft of parents. Generations of children are stolen by cynical, racist administrators in supposedly civilised countries. Religion requires its followers to flourish and multiply, while abandoning all—including family—for their faith. All of these issues and more are explored in this collection of essays about crime fiction and the family.
"Short stories (fiction) by the great nineteenth-century Portuguese author Jose Maria Eca de Queiros; a variety of themes characterize the stories: love, greed, obsession, country life; patriotism"--
The first systematic account of crime fiction as a global genre, offering unprecedented coverage of distinct traditions across the world.