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The Lazarillo Phenomenon illustrates that despite the enormous amount of research already invested in the anonymous novel, it still has much left to offer. --Book Jacket.
Realism has not only shaped important schools and periods in literary history, but has also been a fundamental constant of all literature, its first theoretical formulation being the principle of mimesis in Aristotle's Poetics. Realism can be considered by extension one of the main aspects of literary theory, the aims of which must be to define its concepts clearly and to neutralize the imprecision, polysemy, and ambiguity that often characterized the application of realism. This book explores the possibilities and limits of a concept of realism that seeks a point of equilibrium between the principle of the autonomy of the literary work vis-a`-vis reality and the complex relations that the work clearly establishes with this reality. It acknowledges that it is a personal response to the poststructuralist crisis in literary theory. By concentrating on the study of the literary work of art as a verbal construction, the great Continental and Anglo-American tradition of formalism and New Criticism has ended up neglecting the second, mimetic aspect of the literary problematic, thus dissociating literature from life.
Although the Spanish Inquisition looms large in many conceptions of the early modern Hispanic world, relatively few studies have been made of the Spanish state and Inquisition s approach to book censorship in the seventeenth century. Merging archival and rare book research with a case study of the fiction of Baltasar Gracián, this book argues that privileged authors, like the Jesuit Gracián, circumvented publication strictures that were meant to ensure that printed materials conformed to the standards of Catholicism and supported the goals of the absolute monarchy. In contrast to some elite authors who composed readily transparent critiques of authorities and encountered difficulties with the state and Inquisition, others, like Gracián, made their criticisms covertly in complicated texts like El Criticón.
Although semiotics has, in one guise or another, ftourished uninterruptedly since pre Socratic times in the West, and important semiotic themes have emerged and devel oped independently in both the Brahmanie and Buddhistic traditions, semiotics as an organized undertaking began to 100m only in the 1960s. Workshops materialized, with a perhaps surprising spontaneity, over much ofEurope-Eastern and Western and in North America. Thereafter, others quickly surfaced almost everywhere over the litera te globe. Different places strategically allied themselves with different lega eies, but all had a common thrust: to aim at a general theory of signs, by way of a description of different sign systems...
Exiled to the margins of society and surviving by his wits in the course of his wanderings, the picaro marks a sharp contrast to the high-born characters on whom previous Spanish literature had focused. In this illuminating book, Peter N. Dunn offers a fresh view of the gamut of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish picaresque fiction.
Publisher Description
Between Human and Divine is the first collection of scholarly essays published on a wide variety of contemporary (post 1980) Catholic literary works and artists. Its aim is to introduce readers to recent and emerging writers and texts in the tradition.
Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired.
The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).
Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores. Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relen...