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Paradoxes of Stasis examines the literary and intellectual production of the Francoist period by focusing on Spanish writers following the Spanish Civil War: the regime’s supporters and its opponents, the victors and the vanquished. Concentrating on the tropes of immobility and movement, Tatjana Gajić analyzes the internal politics of the Francoist regime and concurrent cultural manifestations within a broad theoretical and historical framework in light of the Greek notion of stasis and its contemporary interpretations. In Paradoxes of Stasis, Gajić argues that the combination of Francoism’s long duration and the uncertainty surrounding its ending generated an undercurrent of restlessn...
Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, a large number of parodic works were produced that featured depictions of humourous, satirical, and comical saints. The Laughter of the Saints examines this rich carnivalesque tradition of parodied holy men and women and traces their influence to the anti-heroes and picaresque roots of early modern novels such as Don Quixote. The first full-length treatment of the ways in which Spanish writers imitated religious depictions of saints' lives for comic purposes, Ryan D. Giles' erudite study explores the inversion of oaths, invocations, pious legends, and liturgical devotions. Analyzing a variety of texts from Libro de buen amor, to later works such as the Celestina, Carajicomedia, Lozana andaluza, and Lazarillo de Tormes, Giles not only sheds light on Golden Age Spanish literature, but also on the origins of the comic novel. A well-argued and convincing work, The Laughter of the Saints reveals the uproarious results of the collision of official and unofficial methods of storytelling.
Exploring Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Four Spanish Plays explores society’s influence on identity in Spanish theatrical works and discusses parallels to these works in contemporary popular culture. The Spanish plays El retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1615); Virtudes vencen señales (Virtues Overcome Signs) by Vélez de Guevara (1620); El público (The Audience) by Federico García Lorca (1929); and La llamada de Lauren (Lauren’s Call) by Paloma Pedrero (1985) all deal with characters in the midst of a crisis of identity. Using an eclectic approach, supported by contemporary theories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Beth Bernstein analyzes the four plays in terms of identity and shows how society imposes the construction of identity. As the characters reach to define themselves, internal and external pressures guide them in interpreting acceptable behavior. This book offers a close reading of the psychological struggle of the characters, driven by society to cover their differences with a symbolic mask which, if donned, will eventually devour their true identity.
Jorge Manrique was the greatest poet of fifteenth-century Castile and one of the three or four greatest in Spanish literature. Frank A. Domínguez offers here an introduction to Manrique's poetry and the first book-length study of him in English in fifty years. After presenting the biographical and historical context of Manrique's poetry, Domínguez examines the poet's love lyrics, describing the large fund of commonplaces and forms that Manrique's verses share with those of other poets of his age. Manrique's highly stylized language and parallel verse structures express the obsession of the lover with the beloved. Moreover, his attention to parallel construe the world's greatest. In treatin...
The Spanish wife-murder comedias constitute an important category of seventeenth-century peninsular plays. Fatal Union considers thirty-one comedias by fifteen authors to show that they present anything but a unified perspective.
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A critical analysis of Latin American writers from the 1960s to the present reveals interesting insights into the ambiguity of the fiction's break from traditional social realism to a representation of realism which is incomprehensible and paradoxical. Swanson (Hispanic studies, State U. of New York, Albany) examines the "new novel's" inconsistencies, political statements, and postmodern intertextuality through the work of Puig, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera, Infante, Fuentes, Donoso, Sainz, Lispector, and Isabel Allende. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. Hi...