Spanish Literature

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Calderón: The Secular Plays

Although Pedro Calderón de la Barca was one of the greatest and most prolific playwrights of Spain's Golden Age, most of his nonallegorical comedias—118 in all—have remained unknown. Robert ter Horst presents here the first full-length study of these works, a sustained, meditative analysis dealing with more than 80 plays, conveying a sense of the whole of Calderón's secular theater.

To approach so vast a body of literature, Mr. ter Horst examines the meaning and function in Calderón of three broad subjects—myth, honor, and history—the warp threads across which the playwright weaves a subtle tapestry of contrasts, dualities, and conflicts: ...Read More
Dissertations in Hispanic Languages and Literatures: Volume Two: 1967–1977

The decade covered by this second volume saw an enormous expansion of scholarship in the Hispanic languages; more than 3,500 dissertations were written in the United States and Canada and are now indexed here—twice the number contained in the first volume. Coverage has been expanded to include dissertations on the teaching and learning of Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish and on bilingualism of these languages with others.
Four Comedies by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Calderón, the great dramatist of Spain’s Golden Age, was a skilled writer of comedy. His serious dramas have long been highly regarded in the English-speaking world, but his many sparkling comedies are an untapped reservoir for the contemporary theater. The four plays in this volume, three of which appear in English for the first time, have been translated by Kenneth Muir, the noted British scholar and director.

These are comedies of intrigue. They turn on mysterious, quarrels, and jealousies, and they abound in complication and misunderstandings, yet in the end all is explained, to the delight of the audience. Muir’s ...Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
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