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Graf argues that the doubts expressed by both historicists and postmodernists regarding the progressive nature of Don Quijote are exaggerated. Neither do interpretations that abstain from this debate by emphasizing authorial ambivalence or positioning the novel at a crossroads seem as responsible as they once did. Beyond these skeptical and neutral alternatives, there are key steps forward in Cervantes's worldview. These four essays detail Don Quijote's anticipations of many of the same ideas and values that drive today's multiculturalism, feminism, secularism, and materialism. An important thesis here is that the Enlightenment remains the best vantage point from which to appreciate the nove...
Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Manchapresents five major facets of liberty as they appear in the first modern novel. Analyzing the novelist’s attitudes towards religion, feminism, slavery, politics, and economics, Graf argues that Cervantes should be considered a major precursor to great liberal thinkers like Locke, Smith, Mill, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, and Twain. Graf indicates not only the medieval and early modern grounds for Cervantes’s ideas but also the ways in which he anticipated and influenced a wide range of modern articulations of personal freedom. Resistance to tyranny, freedom of conscience, the liberation of women, the abolition of slavery, and the principles of a free market economy are all still fundamental to modern Western Civilization, making Don Quiijote de la Mancha extremely relevant to today’s world. Anatomy of Liberty walks us through how Cervantes’s seminal work both foreshadowed and relates to today’s modern society.
Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain’s nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza,...
The recent rise of dollar, pound, and euro inflation rates has rekindled the debate over potential alternative monies, particularly gold and Bitcoin. Though Bitcoin has been much discussed in recent years, a basic understanding of how it and gold would work as monetary standards is rare. Accessibly written by a pioneering economist, Better Money explains and evaluates gold, fiat, and Bitcoin standards without hype. White uses simple supply-and-demand analysis to explain how these standards work, evaluating their relative merits and explaining their response to shocks, allowing for informed comparisons between them. This book addresses common misunderstandings of the gold standard and Bitcoin, using historical evidence to review the history of money with emphasis on the contest between market and government provision. Known for his work on alternative monetary institutions, White offers a reasoned discussion of which standard is most likely to provide a better money.
In An Overview of the Pre-suppression Society of Jesus in Spain, Patricia W. Manning offers a survey of the Society of Jesus in Spain from its origins in Ignatius of Loyola’s early preaching to the aftereffects of its expulsion. Rather than nurture the nascent order, Loyola’s homeland was often ambivalent. His pre-Jesuit freelance sermonizing prompted investigations. The young Society confronted indifference and interference from the Spanish monarchy and outright opposition from other religious orders. This essay outlines the order’s ministerial and pedagogical activities, its relationship with women and with royal institutions, including the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish members’ roles in theological debates concerning casuistry, free will, and the immaculate conception. It also considers the impact of Jesuits’ non-religious writings.
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the le...
In the 19th century, literature shared with the medical and psychological sciences a strategy of examining the most extreme manifestations of human desire. While fetishism, sadism and masochism still resonate as concepts with critical currency, necrophilia has received little attention. In this groundbreaking study, Lisa Downing rescues necrophilia from the margins of sexual desire, relocating it as a symptom and a pervasive fantasy of modern subjectivity. Drawing case material from the 19th century French canon, the author brings works by Baudelaire and Rachilde into dialogue with foundational European texts of sexology and Psychoanalysis. She reads against the grain of traditional Freudian theories of sexuality, the conventions of 19th century literary scholarship, and feminist critiques of the 'masculine' morbid aesthetic in order to bring to light a model of desire whose problematic nature afflicts existing discourses about sexuality and gender in 19th century France and beyond.
Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.
Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial and gendered results. Decolonizing American Spanish challenges not only the hegemony of Spain and its colonial pedagogies, but also the characterization of Spanish as a foreign language in the United States. By foregrounding Latin American cultures and local varieties of Spanish and reconceptualizing the foreign as domestic, Jeffrey Herlihy-Meraworks to create new conceptual maps, revise inherited ones, and institutionalize marginalized and silenced voices and their stories. Considering the University of Puerto Rico as a point of context, this book brings attention to how translingual solidarity and education, a commitment to social transformation, and the engagement of student voices in their own languages can reinvent colonized education.