Studies in Romance Languages Series

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  A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama

  Spain's Golden Age, the seventeenth century, left the world one great legacy, the flower of its dramatic genius—the comedia. The work of the Golden Age playwrights represents the largest combined body of dramatic literature from a single historical period, comparable in magnitude to classical tragedy and comedy, to Elizabethan drama, and to French neoclassical theater.

  A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama is the first up-to-date survey of the history of the comedia, with special emphasis on critical approaches developed during the past ten years.

  A history of the comedia necessarily focuses on the work of Lope de Vega and ...Read More

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  La Diana of Montemayor as Social and Religious Teaching

  Jorge de Montemayor’s great pastoral novel La Diana (1559), one of the fountainheads of Spanish Renaissance literature, has often been regarded as a work written merely to amuse an effete courtly world. Bruno M. Damiani argues here that, far from being simply a “pastoral dream,” Diana has profound socio-historical and religious dimensions, and that Montemayor’s intentions in it were largely moral and instructive.

  The timeless, idyllic nature which forms the essence of the pastoral is, in the case of Diana, inextricably bound up with the grace and sophistication of urban Spanish culture. Indeed, this study shows, Montemayor’s shepherds and shepherdesses ...Read More

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  The Vatard Sisters

  Les Soeurs Vatard, described by its author as a “lewd but exact” slice of life, was J.-K. Huysmans’ second novel. Huysmans abandoned poetry and turned to the novel at a time when the works of Emile Zola were intensely controversial; Les Soeurs Vatard is dedicated to Zola by "his fervent admirer and devoted friend."In it, Huysmans vividly depicts the scene that for his generation of French writers stood for the contemporary world: the brutal, teeming life of the industrial quarters of Paris in the 1870s.

  Huysmans’ Vatard sisters are “Désirée, an urchin of fifteen, a brunette with large, pale eyes ...Read More

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  The Book of the Knight Zifar: A Translation of El Libro del Cavallero Zifar

  The Book of the Knight Zifar (or Cifar), Spain’s first novel of chivalry, is the tale of a virtuous but unfortunate knight who has fallen from grace and must seek redemption through suffering and good deeds. Because of a curse that repeatedly deprives him of that most important of knightly accoutrements—his horse—Zifar and his family must flee their native India and wander through distant lands seeking to regain their rank and fortune. A series of mishaps divides the family, and the novel follows their separate adventures—alternatively heroic, comic, and miraculous—until at length they are reunited and their honor restored.

  The ...Read More

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  The Festive Play of Fernando Arrabal

  Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal is a major exponent of the Theater of the Absurd. In this study Arrabal’s plays are seen as a contemporary expression of a festive form of theater that flourished during the Middle Ages and that had its roots in the drama of Aeschylus and Aristophanes.

  With this view of Arrabal’s work, Luis Arata explores the nature of play in art in the light of Jean Piaget's psychology. He thus offers a new way to approach festive and playful art.

  Luis Oscar Arata is managing director of the Paradox Studio Theatre in Milwaukee.

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  Three Melodramas by Pietro Metastasio

  Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi (1698–1782) was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti. In this volume, Pietro Metastasio presents new translations of Dido Abandoned, Demetrius, and The Olympiad that stay close to the original form and wording. Featuring an introduction that highlights the playwright's life and significant innovations in dramatic technique as well as a short bibliography, Fucilla’s translations will be of interest not only to literary scholars, but also to those concerned with the history of music.

  Joseph G. Fucilla is professor emeritus of Spanish and Italian at Northwestern University. He holds ...Read More

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  Galdós: The Mature Thought

  The sheer volume of prolific Spanish novelist and playwright Benito Pérez Galdós’s literary production has rendered overall assessment of his body of work all but impossible. The later volumes in his ambitious and popular Episodios nacionales series, in particular, have suffered from scholarly indifference.

  In this acclaimed study, Brian J. Dendle closely considers the twenty-six novels in this series written between 1898 and 1912. These episodios, Dendle contests, are artistically superior to the earlier volumes and offer a unique opportunity to establish the ideological profile of the mature Galdós.

  Brian J. Dendle (1936–2013) is professor emeritus of Spanish at the ...Read More

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  The Perilous Hunt: Symbols in Hispanic and European Balladry

  In the symbolic language of ballads, a lady’s costly dress tells of the beauty of the body beneath it or of the wearer’s happiness; a lost hawk or hound foreshadows the hunter’s fate long before the plot reaches a turning point. In her original and far-reaching study of such familiar narrative elements, Edith Randam Rogers adds much to our understanding of poetic expression in the ballad tradition.

  In focusing on individual motifs as they appear in different ballads, different languages, and different periods, Rogers proves the existence of a reliable lingua franca of symbolism in European balladry. Lines or even ...Read More

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  The Metamorphoses of the Self: The Mystic, the Sensualist, and the Artist in the Works of Julien Green

  American writer Julien Green’s (1900–1998) origins, artistic motivation, and identity was a source of mystery and confusion even for those that most fêted him. The first non-French national to be elected to the Académie française, Green authored several novels (The Dark Journey, The Closed Garden, Moira, Each Man in His Darkness, and the Dixie trilogy), a four-volume autobiography (The Green Paradise, The War at Sixteen, Love in America and Restless Youth), and his famous Diary.

  In this study, John. M Dunaway begins with an examination of the autobiographical context of Julien Green’s works, in which the duality of mystic and ...Read More

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  Pious Brief Narrative in Medieval Castilian and Galician Verse: From Berceo to Alfonso X

  Brief narratives,” or medieval precursors to the modern short story, are compositions couched in the form of a tale of reasonable short length. They began with writings in Latin and, eventually, made their way into the vernacular languages of Europe. They include the fable, the apologue, the exemplum, the saint’s life, the miracle, the biography, the adventure tale, the romance, the jest, and the anecdote, among others. In Spain, the oldest extant brief narratives in written form are in verse and date from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The earliest examples include La vida de Santa Maria Egipciaca ...Read More