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Mother Nature is certainly Emilia Pardo Bazan's greatest contribution to the Realistic/ Naturalistic Spanish novel of her time, and represents her literary powers at the very height of her career as a writer. It has been said that this novel presents the keenest challenges and the most compelling rewards, offering the reader the purposefully overgrown ecological, social, and moral background for a poignant central narrative of human frailty that pits the desire for personal happiness against the necessity of meeting moral standards.
Set against the background of civil unrest in the late 1860s after the overthrow of the monarchy - a period of turmoil, brief restoration, and the eventual triumph of the republicans in 1873 - the novel portrays the life of a young girl, Amparo, growing up in the streets of La Corufia, the city Dona Emilia knew so well from her own wanderings there some years earlier.
This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.
Struck by the contrast between the prestige of their literary tradition and their apparent philosophical insignificance, modern writers from Spain have devoted themselves to exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This Side of Philosophy focuses on four major authors—Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Antonio Machado, and María Zambrano—who engage literary resources in order to reach beyond philosophy to the essential sources of life. Connecting their work to that of other European thinkers dedicated to illuminating the fertile interaction of literature and philosophy—especially Plato, Schlegel, Heidegger, and Derrida—Stephen Gingerich makes a case for the relevance of Spanish thought to contemporary efforts to expand the ethical and theoretical powers of thinking through literature. At the same time, Gingerich challenges the conventional view that contemporary Spanish thought fuses or reconciles literature and philosophy, instead discerning a call to appreciate their difference in relation. For these writers, literature and philosophy are repulsed by each other as inexorably as they are drawn together.
The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from 1600 to the present. Drawing on the combined legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, these essays focus on the question of invention and experiment, on what constitutes the singular features of evolving fictional forms. It examines how the novel articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, and gender and society. Contributors highlight the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the Spanish novel, which often takes a self-conscious stance toward literary tradition. Topics covered include the regional novel, women writers, and film and literature. This companionable survey, which includes a chronology and guide to further reading, conveys a vivid sense of the innovative techniques of the Spanish novel and of the debates surrounding it.
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contributions. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.
Late nineteenth-century Spanish fiction is populated by adulteresses, prostitutes, seduced women, and emasculated men - indicating an almost obsessive interest in gender deviance. In Marginal Subjects, Akiko Tsuchiya shows how the figure of the deviant woman—and her counterpart, the feminized man - revealed the ambivalence of literary writers towards new methods of social control in Restoration Spain. Focusing on works by major realist authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), as well as popular novelists like Eduardo López Bago, Marginal Subjects argues that these archetypes were used to channel collective anxieties about sexuality, class, race, and nation. Tsuchiya also draws on medical and anthropological texts and illustrated periodicals to locate literary works within larger cultural debates. Marginal Subjects is a riveting exploration of why realist and naturalist narratives were so invested in representing gender deviance in fin-de-siècle Spain.