The primary role played by religion in the development of the Spanish nation in the Iberian Peninsula and its subsequent role in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas has been well studied. Similarly, Hispanics around the world and in the United States have been characterized in scholarship and popular opinion by the dimensions of their predominant Catholic faith. To date, neither their diversity of faith nor their ethnic and racial diversity have been adequately addressed, thus contributing to a widely held perception of a monolithic culture with its own Catholic world view, a world view often categorized as obscurantist, mystical and anachronistic. Most important, the role of religion, in all of its diversity and historical evolution, in building Hispanic culture in the United States has not been adequately studied or understood. Today, because a corpus of Hispanic religious thought from across the ages in the United States has been reconstituted and there are scholars dedicated to understanding this thought and the experience it reveals, publication of this present volume has been made possible. The chapters of Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice in the United States have resulted from the research underwritten by the eponymous Recovery project and initially presented at Recovery conferences in 2004 and 2005. After scholarly debate and re-working of the research papers, the articles contained in this volume were selected. They represent original work on topics rarely addressed before, in recognition that these articles are laying the groundwork on which an entire sub-discipline of Hispanic history, literature and theology will be constructed. The material addressed is so rich and the themes so numerous and promising that their presentation and elaboration here most certainly will entice scholars from other disciplines to broaden their perspectives on Hispanic life in the United States and perhaps to look to these religious and other alternative sources in conducting their own disciplinary research.
Women’s life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period. There are, indeed, examples of autobiographical writing by women in Spain and its New World empire, evident as early as the fourteenth-century Memorias penned by Doña Leonor López de Cordóba and continuing through the seventeenth-century Cartas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What sets these accounts apart, the author shows, are the variety of forms adopted by each woman to tell her life and the circumstances in which she adapts her narrative to satisfy the presence of male critics-whether ecclesiastic or political, actual or imagined-who would dismiss or even alter her life story. Analyzing how each of these women viewed her life and, conversely, how their contemporaries-both male and female-received and sometimes edited her account, Howe reveals the tension in the texts between telling a ’life’ and telling a ’lie’.
The Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater provides users with an accessible single-volume reference tool covering Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela). Entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, give succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history. The introduction provides a review of Latin American literature and theater as a whole while separate dictionary entries for each country offer insight into the history of national literatures. Entries for literary terms, movements, and genres serve to complement these commentaries, and an extensive bibliography points the way for further reading. The comprehensive view and detailed information obtained from all these elements will make this book of use to the general-interest reader, Latin American studies students, and the academic specialist.
Góngora's Soledades, the major lyric poem of the Spanish Baroque. Combining philological rigor with a capacity to engage the most contemporary transatlantic and comparatist concerns, this work situates Luis de Góngora's Soledades within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity. As well as offering an insightful analysis of the Soledades as an expression of the Baroque crisis in all its facets -epistemological, ontological, cultural and historical - the author reads the fragmented lyric subject of Gongorist poetics back against Renaissance precursors [Rojas' Celestina and the poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso] and in anticipation of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. The study concludes with an examination of the interaction between the legacies of Gongorism and French Symbolism in the work of selected poets of the Latin American Vanguard [Gorostiza, Paz and Vallejo]. CRYSTAL ANNE CHEMRIS is Visiting Assistant Professorof Spanish at the University of Iowa.
The tenth volume in the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series, this collection of essays reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the project’s efforts to locate, identify, preserve and disseminate the literary contributions of US Latinos from the Spanish Colonial Period to contemporary times. Essays by scholars recalling the beginnings of the project cover a wide range of topics: origins, identity, archival research, institutional politics and pedagogy. From recollections about funding to personal reminiscences, the recovery of Jewish Hispanic heritage and the intellectual project of reframing American history and literature, these articles provide a fascinating look at twenty-five years of recovering the written legacy of the Hispanic population in what has become the United States. An additional nineteen scholarly essays speak to specific efforts to recover an extremely diverse Latino literary heritage. Historians and literary critics who research Spanish, English and Sephardic texts examine a broad array of subjects, including colonialism, historical populations, exile and immigration. This far-reaching book is required reading for those studying US Latino history and literature.
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.