Studies in Romance Languages Series

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  The Tragic Myth: Lorca and Cante Jondo

  With literature, music constituted the most important activity of poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca's life. The two arts were closely related to each other throughout his career. As a child, Lorca imbibed traditional Andalusian songs from the lips of the family maids, whom he would remember with affection years later. At a very early age he began to study piano, and during his adolescence, music and poetry competed for primacy among his interests. His first book was dedicated to his music teacher, who instilled in him a love for the world of art and creation.

  In part I of ...Read More

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  Lorca's Poet in New York: The Fall into Consciousness

  Written in 1929–1930, when Federico García Lorca was visiting Columbia University, Poet in New York stands as one of the great Waste Land poems of the 20th century. It expresses, as Betty Jean Craige writes in this volume,“a sudden radical estrangement of the poet from his universe”—an an estrangement graphically delineated in the dissonant, violent imagery which the poet derives from the technological world of New York.

  Craige here describes—through close analysis of the structure, style, and themes of individual works in Poet in New York—the chaos into which this world plunges the poet, and the process whereby he is ...Read More

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  The Narrative Imagination: Comic Tales by Phillippe de Vigneulles

  Philippe de Vigneulles (1471–1528), cloth merchant and hosier from the city of Metz, wrote a collection of comic short stories which he called Cent Nouvelles ou contes joyeux. The work constitutes an important step in the development of the nouvelle form in France. In an extended explication, Ms. Kotin analyzes the tales for the modern reader, historically, generically, structurally, and in terms of their human significance.

  Inscribed in a tradition of short narrative forms in late medieval and early Renaissance France, these tales remake or recast traditional narrative patterns into new forms. Philippe de Vigneulles’s tales constitute a “recit” of ...Read More

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  The Book of Count Lucanor and Patronio: A Translation of Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor

  Don Juan Manuel, nephew of King Alfonso X, The Wise, knew well the appeal of exempla (moralized tales), which he believed should entertain if they were to provide ways and means for solving life's problems. His fourteenth-century book, known as El Conde lucanor, is considered by many to be the purest Spanish prose before the immortal Don Quixote of Cervantes written two centuries later. He found inspiration for his tales in classical and eastern literatures, Spanish history, and folklore. His stories are not translations, but are his retelling of some of the best stories in existence. The translation succeeds in ...Read More

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  Drama and Ethos: Natural-Law Ethics in Spanish Golden Age Theater

  Spanish Golden Age drama as an expression of morality falls between the extremes of art-for-art’s-sake and utilitarianism. According to Spanish literary critics of the 16th and 17th centuries, drama imitated reality, the subject and domain of philosophy. The integration of drama and scholastic moral philosophy was an important aspect of the critical theory of this era, which held that art should both teach and delight.

  Through close textual analysis of representative plays, this book examines the artistic fusion of natural-law philosophy and drama. It demonstrates the relationship between ethics and the central ideological themes of these works, illustrating that an ...Read More

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  Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante

  This study examines all the characterizations of the female personality in the Divine Comedy, including representations of things traditionally categorized as feminine. Marianne Shapiro treats different traditional feminine roles such as wife, lover, and mother, and places Beatrice in the latter group.

  The problem of woman is studied within the general context of medieval literature. Shapiro’s conclusions center largely upon Dante’s adherence to a generally misogynistic tradition. While in his earlier works his concept of woman was as a comprehensive whole encompassing good and evil, in the Comedy polarities are established and affirmed.

  Marianne Shapiro is associate professor of Italian ...Read More

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  A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut

  This collection is the first full-length literary study on Machaut, France’s leading poet and musician of the 14th century. Machaut’s narrative poems, called dits, have only been lightly studied. Here, author William Calin examines the works for their intrinsic merit and for their historical importance in influencing many writers, most notably Chaucer.

  William Calin is professor of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon.

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  The Spanish Ballad in English

  This study offers an introduction to an important branch of Spanish literature—the romance, or ballad. Although a great many of these poems have been translated into English by various authors, they are not generally known nor easily accessible. Collected here for the first time in a single volume is a broad and representative sampling of romances in translation that encompasses historical ballads (including those about Spain’s greatest folk hero, el Cid), Moorish ballads, and ballads of chivalry, love, and adventure.

  For the collection, Shasta M. Bryant has written a perceptive commentary and critique in which he discusses the individual poems ...Read More

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  Bonaventure des Périers's Novel Pastimes and Merry Tales

  The Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeaux Devis of Bonaventure des Périers are here translated for the first time into modern English. The translators have been successful in retaining the vitality of this important French Renaissance satirist, turning his colloquial sixteenth-century French into equally colloquial and lively American. The translation of the 129 tales is prefaced by a biographical study of des Périers both as man and artist, and a critical bibliography is also included.

  Raymond C. La Charité and Virginia A. La Charité are associate professors of French at the University of Kentucky.

  ...Read More
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  Christian Allegory in Early Hispanic Poetry

  Distinguishing figural or typological allegory—a method adapted from the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament—from the broader Hellenistic concept of allegory, this book examines its use in representative poems of early Hispanic literature. The author focuses on the thematic and structural employment of this originally nonliterary device and comments on the literary problems it posed and the artistic effects which were achieved by it. The development of this particular allegorical method in medieval Hispanic literature—works in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan—he shows, was fully equal to that found in the medieval Latin, Italian, and English literatures, and an understanding of ...Read More