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Little attention has been paid to Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983) as a modernist writer. This study addresses the relationship of her production with Catalan, Spanish, and European modernism. Foregrounded is Rodoreda's negotiation of the overlapping subjects of gender, class, modes of representation, and national identities. In the first three chapters her pre-Civil War novels Soc una dona honrada?, Un dia de la vida d'un home, and Del que hom no pot fugir are read against key Catalan texts, particularly Eugeni d'Ors', to emphasize debates surrounding modernist aesthetics and models of Catalan national identity. The modernist preoccupation with high versus low literature is developed in Aloma, while El carrer de les Camelies reconfigures the flaneur vis-a-vis the female writer's positioning in the modernist enterprise. The modernist debt to realism and the revindication of early Catalan modernism in the 1970s are examined in Mirall trencat. Christine Arkinstall is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at The University of Auckland.
The Time of the Doves - by Mercè Rodoreda - is the powerfully written story of a naïve shop-tender during the Spanish Civil War and beyond, is a rare and moving portrait of a simple soul confronting and surviving a convulsive period in history. The book has been widely translated, and was made into a film.
Merce Rodoreda depicts the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood-through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate.
The volume gives an excellent overall view of Rodoreda's poetry in the original and in translation, her short stories and novels. A completely annotated, cross-indexed bibliography of the critical work on Rodoreda, accompanied by an analysis of the current state of criticism on her work is included.
This bibliography, listed alphabetically by authors of books and articles on Mercè Rodoreda, offers a detailed description of the content of more than two hundred studies on her work. In addition to Rodoreda’s narrative, the last decade has seen many more studies of her theater, poetry, painting, and early journalism. Also included is a comprehensive listing of editions and translations, as well as an index. The intention is to analyze and diffuse the great body of academic production on this worldwide representative of Catalan culture, with the hope that future studies can profit by a reading of pertinent existing scholarship on the subject. There are various kinds of publications, from ...
Thirty one of Merce Rodoreda's most moving and challenging stories which capture his full range of expression. Moving from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism, Rodoreda captures the lives of women who are stuck between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition.
Adri Guinart is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.
This annotated bibliography of one of the best-known Catalan authors selects and comments on 198 critical narrative works, including nine biographical studies. It provides a detailed analysis of the critical perspectives which have been used to analyze Rodoreda's works, referring the reader to the bibliographical entries which best illustrate certain theoretical approaches or themes.
A Gatsby-esque novel about Spain in the 1920s on the eve of the Spanish Civil War
In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Merc_ Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this Broken Mirror, the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic?most notably the Spanish Civil War. Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young fishmonger?s daughter married to a wealthy old man, the story shifts from one perspective to another, reflecting from myriad angles the founding of a matriarchal dynasty?and its eventual, seemingly inevitable disintegration. A family saga extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship, A Broken Mirror is finally also a novel about the inexorable passing of time.