After decades of uncomfortable silence, Spain has now started dealing with its violent twentieth-century past. In recent years, a vibrant memory discourse has emerged in Spanish society: the number of films, TV series, newspaper articles, history books, and memorials dedicated to the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the ensuing dictatorship of Franco has increased dramatically. Literature has also played its part in provoking and maintaining this memory boom, and as a consequence, the study of contemporary Spanish novels has started revolving around questions on the responsibility of the author, on the impact of literature in society, on its role in shaping memories, and on its ethical status. This book takes up these questions in an attempt to combine the outlook of collective memory studies with the theoretical demands of Poststructuralist theories. Focusing on themes such as haunting and the uncanny, nostalgia, the Bildungsroman genre, and autobiography, its author analyses memory narratives in fourteen novels by foremost Spanish authors like Javier Marías, Luis Goytisolo, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Manuel Vicent. -- From publisher's website.
The Translation judges for the National Book Awards--Richard Miller, Alastair Reid, Eliot Weinberger--cited Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia's translation of Cesar Vallejo's The Complete Posthumous Poetry as follows: "This, the first National Book Award to be given to a translation of modern poetry, is a recognition of Clayton Eshleman's seventeen-year apprenticeship to perhaps the most difficult poetry in the Spanish language. Eshleman and his present collaborator, Jose Rubia Barcia, have not only rendered these complex poems into brilliant and living English, but have also established a definitive Spanish test based on Vallejo's densely rewritten manuscripts. In recreating this modern master in English, they have also made a considerable addition to poetry in our language."
Peter Pan was born over a century ago. There is something doubly contradictory in this phrase that, although true, is also the reason why this book has been released. We are talking about the boy who will never grow up and the fact that he is celebrating his hundredth birthday should provoke some surprise. At the same time, he is such a powerful icon that it is also true that he seems to have been there, floating in our culture, reappearing in its images, since time immemorial – much farther back than the early twentieth century. This book shows that, although he considered dying to be an awfully big adventure, Peter Pan is, on his one hundredth birthday, more alive than ever. And our prediction is that he will accompany our culture as long as it survives. Like all great myths, Peter will continue bursting through the window of our texts, leading us to other worlds so that when we least expect it, we will hear his cry emanate from a dark ocean. This book, in a sincere tribute, intends to be both a compilation and a precedent – by inspiring a deeper look into its image, we hope to influence the life of this character so dear and yet so mysterious and seductive. Peter Pan ha cumplido un siglo de vida. Hay algo doblemente contradictorio en esta frase que, por lo demás, es cierta y es el motivo por el cual este libro ha visto la luz. Estamos hablando del niño que nunca crece y el hecho de que celebre su cumpleaños número cien puede provocarnos cierta extrañeza. Por otro lado, se trata de un icono tan poderoso que también es verdad que parece haber estado ahí, flotando en nuestra cultura, resurgiendo en sus imágenes, desde tiempos inmemoriales mucho más lejanos que los albores del siglo XX. Este libro muestra que, a pesar de que considere que morir podría resultar una aventura extraordinaria, Peter Pan está a sus cien años más vivo que nunca. Y el panorama pinta, en efecto, para una vida que acompañe a nuestra cultura mientras ésta sobreviva. Igual que sucede con todos los grandes mitos, Peter seguirá irrumpiendo a través de la ventana de nuestros textos, guiándonos a otros mundos de tal manera que, cuando menos lo esperemos, escucharemos su grito emanar de un océano oscuro. Este libro, en un sincero homenaje, pretende ser compilación y precedente y, mediante la provocación, mediante la motivación de la profundización en su figura, incidir en la trayectoria de la vida de este personaje tan entrañable y a la vez tan misterioso y seductor.
In Prizefighting and Civilization: A Cultural History of Boxing, Race, and Masculinity in Mexico and Cuba, 1840–1940, historian David C. LaFevor traces the history of pugilism in Mexico and Cuba from its controversial beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century through its exponential rise in popularity during the early twentieth century. A divisive subculture that was both a profitable blood sport and a contentious public spectacle, boxing provides a unique vantage point from which LaFevor examines the deeper historical evolution of national identity, everyday normative concepts of masculinity and race, and an expanding and democratizing public sphere in both Mexico and Cuba, the United States’ closest Latin American neighbors. Prizefighting and Civilization explores the processes by which boxing—once considered an outlandish purveyor of low culture—evolved into a nationalized pillar of popular culture, a point of pride that transcends gender, race, and class.
The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-Perspective Aesthetic offers a comprehensive analysis of all eight of Cervantes's Ocho comedias (published 1615), moving beyond conventional anti-Lope approaches to Cervantine dramatic practise in order to identify what, indeed, his theatre promotes. Considered on its own aesthetic terms, but also taking into account ontological and socio-cultural concerns, this study compels a re-assessment of Cervantes's drama and conflates any monolithic interpretations which do not allow for the textual interplay of contradictory and conflicting discourses which inform it. Cervantes's complex and polyvalent representation of freedom underpins such an approach; a concept which is considered to be a leitmotif of Cervantes's work but which has received scant attention with regards to his theatre. Investigation of this topic reveals not only Cervantes's rejection of established theatrical convention, but his preoccupation with the difficult relationship between the individual and the early modern Spanish world. Cervantes's comedias emerge as a counter-perspective to dominant contemporary Spanish ideologies and more orthodox artistic imaginings. Ultimately, The Signifying Self seeks to recuperate the Ocho comedias as a significant part of the Cervantine, and Golden-Age, canon and will be of interest and benefit to those scholars who work on Cervantes and indeed on early modern Spanish theatre in general.
Las historias e invenciones de Félix Muriel, de Rafael Dieste, se publicaron en Buenos Aires en 1943 y, ya entonces, pudo causar cierta sorpresa el hecho de que su autor, exiliado republicano, no se refiriera en ellas a la reciente guerra de España ni a sus consecuencias. Sin embargo, de modo subrepticio, la política estructura el texto y contribuye a construir la problemática unidad del libro -un libro que muchos llamaron "obra maestra" y que José Ramón Marra-López ha situado "al margen de toda posible clasificación". No para clasificarlo, sino para entender esa "marginalidad" y los motivos de su encanto está escrito este estudio, el primero dedicado en extenso específicamente al volumen y el primero que contempla con detenimiento el manuscrito autógrafo.
