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Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963) was one of Spain’s most gifted avant-gardists. Oftentimes remembered as the inventor of the greguería—a type of witty and humorous epigram that recasts the commonplace and absurdities of everyday reality—he was a prolific writer and published dozens of novels, essays, short stories, articles, editorials, and biographies throughout his life. Two of his major works—the autobiography Morbidities (1908), and the manifesto “The Concept of the New Literature” (1909)—belong to his earliest period of experimentation. These two early works are of singular importance not only in understanding his development as an avant-gardist, but also in analyzing Spanish literature within the broader framework of European avant-garde culture. With prescient clarity, they highlight many of the aesthetic notions that would revolutionize experimental literature throughout the modernist period. This book offers the first complete English translation of Morbidities and “The Concept of the New Literature,” and it introduces anglophone readers to some of Gómez de la Serna’s most passionate ideas about modernity and “new literature.”
Can citizenship rights be denied to significant groups in a society that regards itself as civilized and self-governing? Is it possible to exclude such people in the name of freedom and reason? Is it plausible to explain classifications that differentiate between first- and second-class citizens as “natural”? This is the paradox inherent in modern politics, born of the revolutions that ended the Ancien Régime in the western world. Throughout the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, liberalism inspired a representative form of government that appealed to citizenship, yet marginalized many social groups, including natives, women, immigrants, workers, slaves and nomads...
Explores the obstacles to multiculturalism and minority rights in Arab states, including the history of European manipulation of minority politics.
The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s. The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and mediaarchaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructe...
This book contains nine essays on Lucius Annaeus Seneca, distinguished Stoic Philosopher, creative writer, and Statesman of the Neronian Age. As author of epistles, treatises, dialogues, dramas, and epigrams, he produced a variety of works that enriched Rome's literary achievement. Like the previous volumes - Essays on Seneca (Peter Lang, 1993) and Further Essays on Seneca (Peter Lang, 2001) - this book presents an in-depth analysis of the Cordoban Philosopher's thoughts and portrays his erudition, humanitas, artistry, and deep psychological understanding of the frailties and strengths of human nature.
A celebrity in his own day, who gave lectures dressed as Napoleon or seated on the back of an elephant, Ramón Gómez de la Serna is the most representative writer of the interwar Spanish avant-garde. This book explores Gómez de la Serna's art and his quest to break down the barriers between literature and life, addressing two elements - already present in his work - of radical relevance in today's cultural debates: the relation of humans to the material world and the reduction of all experience to a singular individuality. Bringing Gómez de la Serna to an Anglophone audience, it reveals him to be the embodiment of a new kind of art on both sides of the Atlantic.
While the it-narrative, the thing-poem and thing theatre have been around for some time, the essay – which is often considered literature’s fourth genre – is still lacking its thing-subgenre. Yet, particularly British and Anglo-Irish literature display a long, albeit so far implicit tradition of texts that can be categorised as ‘thing-essays’: Starting with Jonathan Swift’s “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (1701) and continuing until today, these texts draw broader insights from the contemplation of a material item of daily life. This book provides the first theoretical conceptualisation of this genre. Bringing elements from essay studies and the New Materialisms together, it s...
This innovative collection explores the points of contact between translation practice and ecological culture by focusing on the relationship between ecology and translation. The volume’s point of departure is the idea that translations, like all human activities, have a relational basis. Since they depend on places and communities to which they are addressed as well as on the cultural environment which made them possible, they should be understood as situated cultural practices, governed by a particular political ecology. Through the analysis of phenomena that relate translation and ecological culture (such as the development of ecofeminism; the translation of texts on nature; translation...
The untold chronicles of the looting and collecting of ancient Mesoamerican objects. This book traces the fascinating history of how and why ancient Mesoamerican objects have been collected. It begins with the pre-Hispanic antiquities that first entered European collections in the sixteenth century as gifts or seizures, continues through the rise of systematic collecting in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ends in 1940—the start of Europe’s art market collapse at the outbreak of World War II and the coinciding genesis of the large-scale art market for pre-Hispanic antiquities in the United States. Drawing upon archival resources and international...