This volume gathers seventeen important contributions to a better understanding of the poetry, drama, and prose of the Golden Age. Theodore S. Beardsley, Jr., Francisco López Estrada, Everett W. Hesse, Margherita Morreale and A. Valbuena Briones are among the contributors.
"The seven texts in this cross-section of fiction and nonfiction reveal a nation at the brink of modernity, embracing revolutionary ideas and reeling in their explosive impact. The opening chapters establish the theoretical framework for Perez-Romero's analysis, describing the intellectual and social environments of medieval Spain and tracing the developments in Spanish historical and literary scholarship that point to the existence of a new path of investigation."--Jacket.
The Golden Age of Spanish drama extends from the close of the 15th century to the death of Calderón in 1681. During that time, the humanists, as dramatists, followed Italy's artistic awakening direction, and imitated Classical drama. With originality and dreams of greatness, they subverted the nature of tragedy; modified the approach of Comedy and invented the New Play, the Comedia Nueva. In it the poet-dramatists introduced important modificaitons of realism, included imagined reality, Christian symbolism and theatricality, as artistic truth. They elaborate all kinds of syntheses. For this reason, the Spanish Golden Age theater can be viewed as part of a tradition that includes the Greco-Roman comedy and tragedy, Christian tragedy, and the authentic national literary and dramatic tendencies. The entries in this reference book explore the fascinating history of the Golden Age of Spanish drama. The volume begins with an introductory overview of the literary, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped dramatic writing of the period. The book then presents alphabetically arranged essays for nineteen significant Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age. Each essay is written by an expert contributor and includes biographical information, an analysis and evaluation of major works, a discussion of critical response to the plays, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The volume closes with a selected general bibliography of central critical studies of Golden Age Spanish drama.
The corpus of literary works shaped by the Renaissance and the Baroque that appeared in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a transforming effect on writing throughout Europe and left a rich legacy that scholars continue to explore. For four decades after the Spanish Civil War the study of this literature flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, where many of the leading scholars in the field were based. Though this particular 'Golden Age' was followed by a decline for many years, there have recently been signs of a significant revival. The present book seeks to showcase the latest research of established and younger colleagues from Great Britain and Ireland on the Spanish Golden Age. It falls into four sections, in each of which works by particular authors are examined in detail: prose (Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracian), poetry (The Count of Salinas, Luis de Gongora, Pedro Soto de Rojas), drama (Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega), and colonial writing (Bernardo Balbuena, Hernando Dominguez Camargo, Alonso de Ercilla). There are essays also on more general themes (the motif of poetry as manna; rehearsals on the Golden Age stage; proposals put to viceroys on governing Spanish Naples). The essays, taken together, offer a representative sample of current scholarship in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume?anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics?investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.
He strives to release both writing practices and female identity from a repressive ideology of the self and focuses on their transformative nature. He presents ways for both writer and female character to define oneself by and for oneself and not in terms of an "other." And in both cases, he stresses the importance of absence to distance himself from past tradition and to emphasize greater freedom and responsibilities for writer and reader and for women in seventeenth-century Spain."--Jacket.
This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference “Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain”, held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume – all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany – focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.
In A Companion to Celestina, Enrique Fernandez brings together twenty-three hitherto unpublished contributions on the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, popularly known as Celestina (c. 1499) written by leading experts who summarize, evaluate and expand on previous studies. The resulting chapters offer the non-specialist an overview of Celestina studies. Those who already know the field will find state of the art studies filled with new insights that elaborate on or depart from the well-established currents of criticism. Celestina's creation and sources, the parody of religious and erudite traditions, the treatment of magic, prostitution, the celestinesca and picaresque genre, the translations into other languages as well as the adaptations into the visual arts (engravings, paintings, films) are some of the topics included in this companion. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Raúl Álvarez Moreno, Consolación Baranda, Ted L. Bergman, Patrizia Botta, José Luis Canet, Fernando Cantalapiedra, Ricardo Castells, Ivy Corfis, Manuel da Costa Fontes, Enrique Fernandez, José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León, Ryan D. Giles, Yolanda Iglesias, Gustavo Illades Aguiar, Kathleen V. Kish, Bienvenido Morros Mestres, Devid Paolini, Antonio Pérez Romero, Amaranta Saguar García, Connie Scarborough, Joseph T. Snow, and Enriqueta Zafra.
This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.