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There has been a widely-held consensus among historians that the Moriscos of Spain made little or no attempt to assimilate to the majority Christian culture around them, and that this apparent obduracy made their expulsion between 1609 and 1614 both necessary and inevitable. This book challenges that view. Assimilation, coexistence, and tolerance between Old and New Christians in early modern Spain were not a fiction or a fantasy, but could be a reality, made possible by the thousands of ordinary individuals who did not subscribe to the negative vision of the Moriscos put around by the propagandists of the government, and who had lived in peace and harmony side by side for generations. For s...
Le présent ouvrage est le fruit d’une réflexion qui a nourri un séminaire de l’équipe des hispanistes (GRIAS) du Centre d’Etudes sur les Littératures Etrangères et Comparées, EA 3069, et d’un colloque international (Espagne,
This book explores how notions of deviancy and social control are dramatized in the novels of the late nineteenth-century Spanish realist author Benito Pérez Galdós. Galdós’s treatment of prostitutes, alcoholics, beggars and vagrants is studied within the context of the socio-cultural and medical debates circulating during the period. Drawing on Foucault’s very specific conceptualization of the idea of control through discourses, the book analyzes how Galdós’s novels interacted with contemporary debates on poverty and deviancy – notably, discourses on hygiene, domesticity and philanthropy. It is proposed that Galdós’s view of marginal social groups was much more open-minded, shrewd and liberal than the often inflexible pronouncements made by contemporary professional voices.
In every country across Europe, at some point or other during the last five hundred years, cheap printed materials were the staple diet of ordinary people, providing a rich array of entertainment, education, and information. They came in various forms, but were usually variations on the theme of single sheets or simple booklets, and they were carried far and wide in pedlars’ packs and sold in the streets, at fairs and markets and wherever crowds gathered, as well as in backstreet shops. Their content was as broad as can be imagined: news and scandal, crimes and last-dying confessions of murderers, divinations, instructional works, wonder stories, miracles, folktales and legends, love stori...
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on different forms of representation of social hybridity in contemporary novels through various cultural and linguistic lenses. It explores the various subcategories of their interdependent relationships, including power and domination between hegemony and marginality. The book revolves around five axes: namely, writing strategies and reterritorialization; marginality and intermediary spaces; revisited urban spaces; when periphery becomes center; and the modality of confrontation and construction of identity. It focuses on the identification and classification of spaces in order to understand their function in relation to the thematic strategy of the novel. Its main objective is identifying the textual representation of the challenge of center and periphery, as well as these concepts’ role and significance in diegesis. Thus, new light is shed on the subject and on the contemporary novel as a whole.
Examines theater and portraiture as interrelated social practices in seventeenth-century Spain. Features visual images and cross-disciplinary readings of selected plays that employ the motif of the painted portrait to key dramatic and symbolic effect.
This collection explores how Christian individuals and institutions – whether Churches, church-related organisations, clergy, or lay thinkers – combined the topics of faith and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. "National identity" is understood in a broad sense that includes discourses of citizenship, narratives of cultural or linguistic belonging, or attributions of distinct, "national" characteristics. The collection addresses Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox perspectives, considers various geographical contexts, and takes into account processes of cross-national exchange and transfer. It shows how national and denominational identities were often mutually constitutive, ...
In this thoughtful and compelling book, leading Spanish literature scholar Noël Valis re-examines the role of Catholicism in the modern Spanish novel. While other studies of fiction and faith have focused largely on religious themes, Sacred Realism views the religious impulse as a crisis of modernity: a fundamental catalyst in the creative and moral development of Spanish narrative.
This book reconfigures the study of the origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire. Challenging dominant interpretations of the period, this book shows that early eighteenth-century Spanish authors turned to Enlightenment ideas to reinvent Spain’s role in the European balance of power. And while international law grew to provide a legal framework that could safeguard peace, Spanish officials, diplomats, and authors, hardened by the failure of Spanish diplomacy, sought instead to regulate international relations by drawing on investment, profit, and self-interest. The book shows, on the basis of new archival research, that the Diplomatic Enlightenment sought to turn the Spanish Empire into a space for closer political cooperation with other European and non-European states and empires.