Spanish Literature

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  Amadis of Gaul, Books III and IV

  In the long history of European prose, few works have been more influential and popular than Amadis of Gaul. It is a landmark work among the knight-errantry tales and probably derives from an oral tradition. Although its original author is unknown, it was likely written during the early fourteenth century, with the first known version of this work, dating from 1508, written in Spanish by Garci Ordóñez (or Rodríguez) de Montalvo. An early bestseller of the age of printing, Amadis of Gaul was translated into dozens of languages and spawned sequels and imitators over the centuries. A handsome, valiant, and ...Read More

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  Amadis of Gaul, Books I and II: A Novel of Chivalry of the 14th Century Presumably First Written in Spanish

  Includes a new Introduction by John E. Keller In the long history of European prose fiction, few works have been more influential and more popular than the romance of chivalry Amadis of Gaul . Although its original author is unknown, it was probably written during the early fourteenth century. The first great bestseller of the age of printing, Amadis of Gaul was translated into dozens of languages and spawned sequels and imitators over the centuries. A handsome, valiant, and undefeatable knight, Amadis is perhaps best known today as Don Quixote’s favorite knight-errant and model. This exquisite English translation restores a ...Read More

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  Daily Life Depicted in the Cantigas de Santa Maria

  The hundreds of illuminated miniatures found in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, sponsored by King Alfonso X (1252–84), reveal many vistas of daily life in thirteenth century Spain.

  No other source provides such an encyclopedic view of all classes of medieval European society, from kings and popes to the lowest peasants. Men and women are seen farming, hunting, on pilgrimage, watching bullfights, in gambling dens, making love, tending silkworms, eating, cooking, and writing poetry, to name only a few of the human activities represented here.

  Combining keen observation of detail with years of experience in the field, John Keller and ...Read More

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  The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses

  Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is perhaps the most engaging of the great Western modernists of this century. Born in Portugal but raised and educated in southern Africa, Pessoa wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

  George Monteiro provides refreshingly new interpretations of Pessoa's Mensagem (Message) and the modernist novella 0 Banqueiro Anarquista (The Anarchist Banker). But he is primarily interested in tracing Pessoa's influence on a wide range of contemporary writers.

  Among those Monteiro finds putting Pessoa's work to their own surprising—and sometimes comic—uses are Joyce Carol Oates, Allen Ginsberg, John Wain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and earlier poets including Thomas Merton, Edouard Roditi, and ...Read More

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  Miracles of Our Lady

  Miracle tales, in which people are rewarded for piety or punished for sin through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, were a popular literary form all through the Middle Ages. Milagros de Nuestra Sehora, a collection of such stories by the Spanish secular priest Gonzalo de Berceo, is a premier example of this genre; it is also regarded as one of the four most important texts of medieval Spain. Difficulties in translating this work have made it unavailable in English except in fragments; now Spanish-language scholars Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash have made the entire work accessible to ...Read More

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  Dramas of Distinction: Plays by Golden Age Women

  Renaissance Europe was the scene of flourishing and innovative dramatic art, and seventeenth-century Spain enjoyed its own Golden Age of the stage. According to traditional studies of this period, however, men seemed to be the only participants. Now in Dramas of Distinction, Teresa Scott Soufas offers the first book-length critical study of five important women playwrights: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor.

  By locating the plays within their period, Soufas avoids universalizing women without regard to history. Her approach transcends the simple ...Read More

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  The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa

  Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524- 1580) remains perhaps the least known outside his native Portugal, and his influence on literature in English has not been fully recognized. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camões.

  Introduced to English readers in 1655, Camões's work from the beginning appealed strongly to writers. The young Elizabeth Barrett's Camonean poems, for example, inspired Edgar Allan Poe to appropriate elements from Camões. Herman ...Read More

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  Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond

  Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists.

  Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse ...Read More

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  Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes

  In this wide-ranging study E. Michael Gerli shows how Cervantes and his contemporaries ceaselessly imitated one another—glossing works, dismembering and reconstructing them, writing for and against one another—while playing sophisticated games of literary one-upmanship.

  The result was that literature in late Renaissance Spain was often more than a simple matter of source and imitation. It must be understood as a far more subtle, palimpsest-like process of forging endless series of texts from other texts, thus linking closely the practices of reading, writing, and rewriting. Like all major writers of the age, Cervantes was responding not just to specific literary traditions ...Read More

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  Dark Prisms: Occultism in Hispanic Drama

  The mythological, folkloric, and religious beliefs of Western culture have resulted in a long and ongoing history of esoteric themes in theatre from the Middle Ages to the present in Spain and the America. Now Robert Lima, a noted comparatist, brings to bear on this material his wide knowledge of the world of the occult. Lima defines the terms “occult" and “occultism" broadly to embrace the many ways in which humans have sought to fathom a secret knowledge held to be accessible only through such supernatural agencies as alchemy, angelology, asceticism, astrology, demonolatry, divination, ecstasy, magic, necromancy, possession, Santeria, séances, ...Read More