Delve into three of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's most haunting parables. This essential Unamuno reader begins with the full-length novel Abel Sanchez, a modern retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. Also included are two remarkable short stories, The Madness of Doctor Montarco and San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, featuring quixotic, philosophically existential characters confronted by the dull ache of modernity. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan and with an insightful introduction by Mario J. Valdes
Abel Sánchez: A Tale of Passion is considered one of the most important works of Spanish literature of the 20th century. The book is a philosophical and psychological reflection on the human being and its condition. The story revolves around two main characters: Abel and Joaquín. Abel is seen as the personification of life and joy, while Joaquín is the personification of death and suffering. Through the narrative, Miguel de Unamuno explores issues such as the struggle between life and death, the search for happiness and truth, and human nature. In addition, the author uses the figure of Joaquín to question the nature of science and religion, and how they relate to human life. Unamuno's writing is intense and poetic, and his reflections are deep and touching. The book is an enriching and challenging read that will certainly make the reader question their own beliefs and values.
A version of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. The Cain of the novel is named Joaquin. Though they are not brothers, they have grown up together, competing as brothers would. Abel becomes a famous and recognized painter while Joaquin becomes a well-known doctor. Joaquin's goal is to outdo Abel by making medical discoveries, thus competing with Abel's art by excelling at science, which also is an art. Joaquin always has been jealous of Abel and competitive with him, but what bothers him most is that Abel does not feel the same sense of rivalry. Abel marries Helena, Joaquin's cousin, whom Joaquin hoped to wed. To allay his envy and hatred, Joaquin marries Antonia, not out of love but simply to maintain his competitive standing with Abel. Abel and Helena have a son named Abelin, Joaquin and Antonia have a daughter named Joaquina. Joaquin lives out his jealous ambitions through his daughter. As the story of Cain and Abel ends, so does this novel. Reaching the point of utter hatred, Joaquin takes Abel's life. When Joaquin dies, he apologizes to his family. Realizing that his life was consumed by hatred and envy, he says that if only he had loved his wife, Antonia, she could have been his savior.
Migrant architects of the NHS draws on forty-five oral history interviews and extensive archival research to offer a radical reappraisal of how the National Health Service was made. It tells the story of migrant South Asian doctors who became general practitioners in the NHS. Imperial legacies, professional discrimination and an exodus of UK-trained doctors combined to direct these doctors towards work as GPs in some of the most deprived parts of the UK. In some areas, they made up over half of the general practitioner workforce. The NHS was structurally dependent on them and they shaped British society and medicine through their agency. Aimed at students and academics with interests in the history of immigration, immigration studies, the history of medicine, South Asian studies and oral history. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about how Empire and migration have contributed to making Britain what it is today.
Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Finnegans Wake, Ricardo Quinones examines the contexts of a master metaphor of our culture. This brilliant work is the first comprehensive book on the Cain and Abel story. "Ricardo Quinones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written, formidably but gracefully erudite, and illustrating the capacity of Judeo-Christian culture and the modernity emerging from it constantly to criticize the darker side of its own foundations and realizations."--Joseph Frank "Ricardo J. Quinones skips Biblical and Talmudic exegesis to follow Cain and Abel through later centuries, from classical times to the present. What he uncovers sheds light on important shifts of consciousness and behavior in European and American culture. . . . Quinones writes with true eloquence and conviction. . . ."--James Finn Cotter, The Hudson Review "Quinones's study of how [the] three Cains were transformed by Romanticism and Modernism into a sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always necessary archetype of the modern world is literary and cultural analytic history at its very best."--Choice Ricardo J. Quinones is Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of English and Comparative Literatures, and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He is the author of The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard), Dante Alighieri (Twayne), and Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton). Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
In The Great Chiasmus, Paul R. Olson explores the use of the chiasmus in the work of Miguel de Unamuno. The chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases, appears on a variety of levels, from brief microstructures (blanca como la nieve y como la nieve fria), to the narrative structures of entire novel. Olson even suggests the chiasmus encompasses the stages in Unamuno's novelistic work, forming a chiasmus that can be schematized as ABC: CBA. As a phenomenon of enclosure, the chiasmus is related to other enclosing phenomena such as the image of Chinese boxes and the mise en abyme. These structures, three-dimensional version of the chiasmus, are also frequent in Unamuno's texts. The chiasmus is also found on the conceptual level, in which Unamuno regards apparent contraries as freely reversible and thus identical. From early adulthood he was fascinated by the Hegelian idea of the identity of pure Being and pure Nothingness, and that concept provides the structure underlying a wide variety of his paradoxes and verbal conceits. In this connection, Unamuno explores concepts usually considered opposites, such as mind and body or spirit and matter. Olson's close readings of the texts in terms of this structure lead to observations on Spanish history, events in Unamuno's life, the psychological dimensions of his characters, and the authorial self that is found within his texts.
This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.
