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Quixotic Modernists gives close readings of two novels by two little-studied writers of the early twentieth century in Spain, Felipe Trigo's Las ingenuas (1901) and Maria Martinez Sierra's Tu eres la paz (1906), in relation to the canonical Tristana by Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. This study shows the modern message (regarding gender), and modernist qualities of the prose of these works. Included are discussions of Quijote intertexts, proverbial language and tactics, the angel and the mujer-nina, flower, water, and animal imagery, and visual arts in relation to gender definition. Also included are contemporary responses to the novels and material about the authors' lives and Spain's social conditions in the early twentieth century. Quixotic Modernists integrates these themes into a study of the novelization of difficulties in transforming contemporary gender and class roles. In all three authors' works, this process of change in roles for both men and women becomes a quixotic enterprise, in which artists as/and characters search to reconnect with an elusive material, social body.
This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdos's first series of Episodios Nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)'s La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixotism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.
Dire word of the cultural threat of the lowbrow goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and yet, Stephanie Sieburth suggests, no division between "high" and "low" culture will stand up to logical scrutiny. Why, then, does the opposition persist? In this book Sieburth questions the terms of this perennial debate and uncovers the deep cultural, economic, and psychological tensions that lead each generation to reinvent the distinction between high and low. She focuses on Spain, where this opposition plays a special role in notions of cultural development and where leading writers have often made the relation of literature to mass culture the theme of their novels. Choosing two historical mome...
"In the writing of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's most prolific and innovative nineteenth-century novelist, Hazel Gold finds the act of framing insistently at work. By exploring Galdós's methods of structuring and evaluating literary and historical experience, Gold illuminates the novelist's art and uncovers the far-reaching narratological, social, and epistemological implications of his framing stategies. A close look at Galdós's novels reveals the artist at pains to contain and interpret what he perceived to be the distinctive and oftening disheartening experience of bourgeois liberalism of his day. Looking beyond text to context, Gold examines the ways in which Galdós's work itself has been framed by readers and critics in accordance with changing allegiances to contemporary literary theory and the canon. The highly ambiguous status of the frame in Galdós's fiction confirms the author's own signal position as a writer poised at the limits between realism and modernity" --
The study examines the ways in which these writers portray their positioning in relation to dominant cultural models of the time and their engagement with political and social issues in a period of changing gender dynamics and political instability. In broader terms, this book examines the complex relationships between memory, writing, and identity, and thus contributes to the growing field of explorations of the workings of memory in narrative."--BOOK JACKET.
This book examines Eastern philosophies of meditative silence in the context of Western rhetoric and discourse theory, arguing that silence is an authentic mode of knowing. Rather than an emptiness that is nihilistic, the void of meditative silence is, according to the author, a fullness in which meaning occurs. Kalamaras calls for a rethinking of the implications of such a concept of silence on contemporary theories of composition and the teaching of writing.
The research collected in this volume consists of 18 chapters which explore a number of key areas of investigation in contemporary Iberian studies. As the title suggests, there is a strong emphasis on trans-national and trans-regional approaches to the subject area, reflecting current discourse and scholarship, but the contributions are not limited by these approaches and include an eclectic range of recent work by scholars of history, politics, literature, the visual arts and cultural and social studies, often working in transdisciplinary ways. The geographical scope of the transnational processes considered range from intra-Iberian interconnections to those with the UK, Italy and Morocco, as well as transatlantic influences between the Peninsula and Argentina, Cuba and Brazil. The book opens up some pioneering new directions in research in Iberian studies, as well as variety of fresh approaches to hitherto neglected aspects of more familiar issues.
Offner clarifies the complex relations of the United States, Spain, and Cuba leading up to the Spanish-American War and contends that the war was not wanted by any of the parties but was nonetheless unavoidable. He shows that a final round of peace negotiations failed in large part because internal political constraints limited diplomatic flexibility.
Signs of Science: Literature, Science, and Spanish Modernity since 1868 traces how Spanish culture represented scientific activity from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The book combines the global perspective afforded by historical narrative with detailed rhetorical analyses of images of science in specific literary and scientific texts. As literary criticism it seeks to illuminate similarities and differences in how science and scientists are pictured; as cultural history it follows the course of a centuries-long dialogue about Spain and science.