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The Literature of Al-Andalus is an exploration of the culture of Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal, during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and in the centuries following the Christian conquest when Arabic continued to be widely used. The volume embraces many other related spheres of Arabic culture including philosophy, art, architecture and music. It also extends the subject to other literatures - especially Hebrew and Romance literatures - that burgeoned alongside Arabic and created the distinctive hybrid culture of medieval Iberia. Edited by an Arabist, an Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters compiled by a team of the world's leading experts of Islamic Iberia, Sicily and related cultures, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work which offers a interesting approach to the field.
Once the most popular form of Spanish entertainment short of the bullfight, the zarzuela boasts a long history of bridging the categories of classical and popular art. It is neither opera nor serious drama, yet it requires both trained singers and good actors. The content is neither purely folkloric nor high art; it is too popular for some and too classical for others. In Zarzuela, Janet L. Sturman assesses the political as well as the musical significance of this chameleon of music-drama. Sturman traces the zarzuela's colorful history from its seventeenth-century origins as a Spanish court entertainment to its adaptation in Spain's colonial outposts in the New World. She examines Cuba's piv...
"These critical studies propose innovative readings and overall reformulations of the texts and authors that stand as representative of the period for the contemporary reader. The first group of articles refers to reports, chronicles, and Renaissance epics, a vast block of texts that fall in most cases halfway between history and narrative fiction, and examine the experiences of the discovery, the conquest, and the colonization of the new territories. The second group concentrates on regionally marked texts from the Baroque period, especially those of the central figure of the Mexican nun poet and intellectual, Sor Juana In s de la Cruz. Finally, there are some essays on representative texts of the latter part of the colonial period."--Publisher's description.
How is the politics of Blackness figured in the flamenco dancing body? What does flamenco dance tell us about the construction of race in the Atlantic world? Sonidos Negros traces how, in the span between 1492 and 1933, the vanquished Moor became Black, and how this figure, enacted in terms of a minstrelized Gitano, paradoxically came to represent Spain itself. The imagined Gypsy about which flamenco imagery turns dances on a knife's edge delineating Christian and non-Christian, White and Black worlds. This figure's subversive teetering undermines Spain's symbolic linkage of religion with race, a prime weapon of conquest. Flamenco's Sonidos Negros live in this precarious balance, amid the purposeful confusion and ruckus cloaking embodied resistance, the lament for what has been lost, and the values and aspirations of those rendered imperceptible by enslavement and colonization.
In Secrets of Pinar’s Game, Roger Boase is the first to decipher a card game completed in 1496 for Queen Isabel, Prince Juan, her daughters and her 40 court ladies. This game offers readers access to the cultural memory of a group of educated women, revealing their knowledge of proverbs, poetry and sentimental romance, their understanding of the symbolism of birds and trees, and many facts ignored in official sources. Boase translates all verse into English, reassesses the jousting invenciones in the Cancionero general (1511), reinterprets the poetry of Pinar’s sister Florencia, and identifies Acevedo, author of some poems about festivities in Murcia c. 1507. He demonstrates that many of Pinar’s ladies reappear as prostitutes in the anonymous Carajicomedia two decades later.
This book gives a detailed picture of the contributions made by women writers to Western literature from the third century to the thirteenth. Many of the texts Peter Dronke presents and interprets have hitherto remained unknown, or virtually inaccessible; some have never been edited or translated before. The emphasis throughout is on personal testimonies, and on texts that have notable literary or intellectual interest. Thus the book affords many new insights into medieval literature, not only into the writings of renowned women such as Hrotsvitha or Heloise, but also into those of a number of neglected writers who are exceptional in their gifts and individuality. Already highly influential, Women Writers of the Middle Ages continues to be essential reading for specialists and students alike in medieval literature, medieval intellectual history, and women's studies.
An account of the transformation of cultural assumptions affecting parental authority and children's freedom to choose marriage partners, this book traces colonial period changes in ideas about free will, love, and honor, and in the views of the Catholic church.
First published in 1989, this collection of essays brings into focus the history of a specific form of violence – that of representation. The contributors identify representations of self and other that empower a particular class, gender, nation, or race, constructing a history of the west as the history of changing modes of subjugation. The essays bring together a wide range of literary and historical work to show how writing became an increasingly important mode of domination during the modern period as ruling ideas became a form of violence in their own right. This reissue will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in the concept of violence, and the boundaries and capacity of discourse.
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.