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This book explores the protracted interest in Spain and its culture, and it exposes the co-existent ambiguity between scorn and fascination that characterizes Western historical perceptions, in particular in Britain and the Low Countries.
Historical and literary works from the Spanish Golden Age offer a wealth of information about the Spanish view of the conflict in the Netherlands during the Dutch Revolt and the ensuing Eighty Years' War (1568-1648). The war in the cold north was to become a fixed component in the lives of the Spaniards of the Golden Age for many years. This book reconstructs the images that the Spanish had of the Netherlands and its inhabitants. These images are inextricably intertwined with the picture that the Spanish constructed of themselves as participants in the conflict. This book follows the developments of these images from the construction of an image of the enemy that reached a climax between 162...
This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell'Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi's analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.
The Revolt in the Netherlands erupted in 1566 and tore apart the Low Countries. In Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700 Jasper van der Steen explains how public memories of the Revolt in the Habsburg Netherlands in the South and the Dutch Republic in the North diverged and became the objects of fierce contestation in domestic political struggles, on both sides of the border and throughout the seventeenth century. Against widespread assumptions about the supposed modernity of cultural memory Memory Wars argues that early modern public memory did not require the presence of state actors, nationalism and modern mass media in order to play a role of political importance in both North and South.
Germán Jiménez-Montes sheds light on the role of foreigners in the Spanish empire. The book examines how a group of Dutch, Flemish and German merchants came to dominate the supply of timber in Seville.
Exploring reason of state in a global monarchy, The Power of Necessity examines how thinkers and agents in the Spanish monarchy navigated the tension between political pragmatism and moral-religious principle. This tension lies at the very heart of Counter-Reformation reason of state. Nowhere was the need for pragmatic state management greater than in the overstretched Spanish Empire of the seventeenth century. However, pragmatic politics were problematic for a Catholic monarchy steeped in ideals of justice and divine justifications of power and kingship. Presenting a broad cast of characters from across Europe, and uniting published sources with a wide range of archival material, Lisa Kattenberg shows how non-canonical thinkers and agents confronted the political-moral dilemmas of their age by creatively employing the legitimizing power of necessity. Pioneering new ways of bridging the persistent gap between theory and practice in the history of political thought, The Power of Necessity casts fresh light on the struggle to preserve the monarchy in a modernizing world.
Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly...
Satire is clearly one of today’s most controversial socio-cultural topics. In this edited volume, The Power of Satire, it is studied for the first time as a dynamic, discursive mode of performance with the power of crossing and contesting cultural boundaries. The collected essays reflect the fundamental shift from literary satire or straightforward literary rhetoric with a relatively limited societal impact, to satire’s multi-mediality in the transnational public space where it can cause intercultural clashes and negotiations on a large scale. An appropriate set of heuristic themes – space, target, rhetoric, media, time – serves as the analytical framework for the investigations and determines the organization of the book as a whole. The contributions, written by an international group of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, manifest academic standards with a balance between theoretical analyses and evaluations on the one hand, and in-depth case studies on the other.
Isn’t translation all about saying exactly the same thing in another language? Aren’t national images totally outdated in this era of globalization? Most people might agree but this book amply illustrates how persistent and multifaceted clichés on translation and nation can be. Time and again, translating involves making transfer choices and these choices are never neutral. Though globalization has seemingly all but erased national ideologies and cultural borders, such ideologies and borders continue to play a determining role in conflicts, identity politics and cultural profiles. The place where transfer choices and forms of national and cultural representation come together is also the place where Translation Studies and Imagology meet. This book offers a wealth of chapters showing how decisive selection and transfer processes can be in representing national images, both self-images and images of the other(s). It shows also how intensely the two disciplines can work together and mutually benefit from shared data and methodologies.