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Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492. Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda. Examining a wide range of source material including legal documents, historical narratives, polemical and hagiographic works, poetry, music, and visual art, Simon Barton presents a nuanced reading of the ways interfaith couplings were perceived, tolerated, ...
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 picaresque describes a specific set of early modern Spanish narratives relating the life story of a lowborn adventurer in a realist, ironic, and often humorous manner. The protagonist, the picaro or pícara (rascal), seeks upward mobility in a resolutely hierarchical society determined to prevent his - or her - ascent, and both are rich targets of satire. Spanish pícaros inspired Anglo-French rogues includi...
"Employing a broad historical perspective that forces the reevaluation of historical and literary commonplaces, Soufas artfully illuminates the complex responses of Spanish Golden Age authors to major shifts in European intellectual outlook during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century."--Publishers website.
Radical Theatricality argues that our narrow search for extant medieval play scripts depends entirely on a definition of theater far more literary than performative. This literary definition pushes aside some of our best evidence of Spain's medieval performance traditions precisely because this evidence is considered either intangible or "un-dramatic" (that is, monologic). By focusing on the dialogic relationship that inherently exists between performer and spectator in performance--rather than on the kind of literary dialogue between characters traditionally associated with drama--Radical Theatricality diachronically examines the performative poetics of the jongleuresque tradition (broadly defined to encompass such disparate performers as ancient Greek rhapsodes and contemporary Nobel Laureate Dario Fo) and synchronically traces its performative impact on the Spanish theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Casuistry and Early Modern Spanish Literature examines a neglected yet crucial field: the importance of casuistical thought and discourse in the development of literary genres in early modern Spain. Faced with the momentous changes wrought by discovery, empire, religious schism, expanding print culture, consolidation of legal codes and social transformation, writers sought innovation within existing forms (the novella, the byzantine romance, theatrical drama) and created novel genres (most notably, the picaresque). These essays show how casuistry, with its questioning of example and precept, and meticulous concern with conscience and the particularities of circumstance, is instrumental in cultivating the subjectivity, rhetorical virtuosity and spirit of inquiry that we have come to associate with the modern novel.
How did German composers brand their music as Venetian? How did the Other fare in other languages, when Cabeza’s Relación of colonial Americas appeared in translations? How did Altdorf emblems travel to colonial America and Sweden? What does Virtue look like in a library collection? And what was Boccaccio’s Decameron doing in the Ethica section? From representations of Sophie Charlotte, the first queen in Prussia, to the Ottoman Turks, from German wedding music to Till Eulenspiegel, from the translation of Horatian Odes and encyclopedias of heraldry, these essays by leading scholars explore the transmission, translation, and organization of knowledge in early modern Germany, contributing sophisticated insights to the history of the early modern book and its contents.
Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world’s first transatlantic empire and its various miscegenations. Contributors to this volume offer the reader diverse vantage points on the challenging problem of how identities in the Hispanic world may be analyzed and interpreted. A number of contributors relate earlier processes and formations to Neo-Baroque and postmodern conceptualisations of identity. Given the strong interest in identity and identity-formation within contemporary cultural studies, the book will be of interest to a broad group of readers from the fields of law, geography, history, anthropology and literature.
"Like cartographers after the Treaty of Versailles, contemporary critics of picaresque literature are hard at work redrawing lines and polemicizing boundaries in an attempt to resolve prevailing problems of definition and method. To reevaluate this canon of texts and to address critical issues, a group of internationally renowned scholars gathered in April 1989 for a two-day conference, "The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue's Tale," which was held at the University of Maryland at College Park and sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies in conjunction with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The essays in this volume grew out of this scholarly exchange and map ou...