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&“Titology,&” a term first coined in 1977 by literary critic Harry Levin, is the field of literary studies that focuses on the significance of a title in establishing the thematic developments of the pages that follow. While the term has been used in the literary community for thirty years, this book presents for the first time a thoroughly developed theoretical discussion on the significance of the title as a foundation for scholarly criticism. Though Maiorino acknowledges that many titles are superficial and &“indexical,&” there exists a separate and more complex class of titles that do much more than simply decorate a book&’s spine. To prove this argument, Maiorino analyzes a wi...
Examines one of the first Renaissance novels to feature an ordinary man, not a nobleman or ancient hero, as the main character.
"Picaresque Tales" - parodic narratives relating the adventures of a rogue - have been central to the development of Spanish literature since the time of Cervantes. This text incorporates poststructuralist theory into a comprehensive treatment of such tales written during the Spainish Golden Age. The essays in this volume examine such works as "Lazarillo de Tormes", "Guzman de Alfarache" and "El buscon". The contributors address the connection between literary representation and everyday life, examining the context in which the Picaresque mode developed.
This study is the first to consider the whole body of Leonardo's works with an eye to a comprehensive interpretation that combines both cultural history and the history of ideas. According to Maiorino, Leonardo's was a mythmaking mode of activity that had a Daedalian range and affected art and technology alike. As both artist and inventor, Leonardo did not separate reason from experience, empiricism from abstraction, an attitude Maiorino characterizes as "Anti-Humanism." Rather than accepting the earlier view that the culture of the Renaissance was divided against itself or that it came to be divided, he argues that anti-Humanism was present from the start in such founders as Petrarch and Alberti and continued to be a current in later authors and artists; hence the significance of Leonardo to Humanism and to Baroque and Renaissance culture at large.
The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – wi...
"The seven texts in this cross-section of fiction and nonfiction reveal a nation at the brink of modernity, embracing revolutionary ideas and reeling in their explosive impact. The opening chapters establish the theoretical framework for Perez-Romero's analysis, describing the intellectual and social environments of medieval Spain and tracing the developments in Spanish historical and literary scholarship that point to the existence of a new path of investigation."--Jacket.
Essays in this volume explore the popular cultural effects of rock culture on high literary production in Spain in the 1990s.
Exhibiting Slavery examines the ways in which Caribbean postmodern historical novels about slavery written in Spanish, English, and French function as virtual museums, simultaneously showcasing and curating a collection of "primary documents" within their pages. As Vivian Nun Halloran attests, these novels highlight narrative "objects" extraneous to their plot—such as excerpts from the work of earlier writers, allusions to specific works of art, the uniforms of maroon armies assembled in preparation of a military offensive, and accounts of slavery's negative impact on the traditional family unit in Africa or the United States. In doing so, they demand that their readers go beyond the pages of the books to sort out fact from fiction and consider what relationship these featured "objects" have to slavery and to contemporary life. The self-referential function of these texts produces a "museum effect" that simultaneously teaches and entertains their readers, prompting them to continue their own research beyond and outside the text.