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This volume makes most wide-ranging attempt ever to probe the natures, origins, and consequences of obscenity in medieval literature, art, theater, and law. One large section examines obscenity in medieval French literature, especially fabliaux; but the rest of the book explores obscenity in cultures and languages of other regions in Europe.
In Toledo in 1529, a converso named Pedro de Cazalla declared that the connection between man and God was but a thread and that it should not be mediated by the Church. Hardly an isolated phenomenon, Cazalla’s inner spirituality was a widespread response to the increasing repression of religious dissent enacted by the Inquisition. Forced baptisms of Jews and Muslims had profound effects across Spanish society, leading famous intellectuals as well as ordinary men and women to rethink their sense of belonging to the Christian community and their forms of religiosity. Thus, in this book, early modern Iberia emerges as a laboratory of European-wide transformations.
This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.
The counter-epic is a literary style that developed in reaction to imperialist epic conventions as a means of scrutinizing the consequences of foreign conquest of dominated peoples. It also functioned as a transitional literary form, a bridge between epic narratives of military heroics and novelistic narratives of commercial success. In Discourses of Empire, Barbara Simerka examines the representation of militant Christian imperialism in early modern Spanish literature by focusing on this counter-epic discourse. Simerka is drawn to literary texts that questioned or challenged the imperial project of the Hapsburg monarchy in northern Europe and the New World. She notes the variety of critical...
A close reading of Erasmus' (d. 1536) work on prayer and spirituality that analyses how he understood prayer and demonstrates how his publications on prayer form part of the larger pastoral program that was implemented by the printing press.
The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged place for ideological negotiation, the comedia provided negative and positive reflections of kingship at a time when there was a perceived crisis of monarchical authority in the Habsburg court. Author María Cristina Quintero explores how playwrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Antonio Coello, and Francisco Bances Candamo--taking inspiration from legend, myth, and history--repeatedly staged fantasies of feminine rule, at a t...
Fray Antonio de Guevara (1482-1545), the most prolific writer of pseudo-historical prose in sixteenth-century Spain, was named official chronicler by Emperor Charles V in 1526. Despite his title, Guevara never wrote a conventional history. A master of fictional semblance, Guevara self-fashioned his own literary personae or masks - among them those of friar, bishop, chronicler, courtier, imperial counselor, and court buffoon. In his pseudo-historical prose, Guevara resoundingly uses the voices of both the novelist and the court buffoon, entertaining the reader with humor, wit, satire, and irony. Artistically manipulating both classical and contemporary history, Guevara innovatively creates a vast and labyrinthine web in which history and fiction form an inseparable hybrid: a pseudo-historical narrative that heralds the essay and the modern novel.
At the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, literature and history were wrenched apart. Wlad Godzich, one of the animators of the turn toward literary theory, seeks to restore historical consciousness to criticism after a period of its painful repression. In this sweeping study, he considers the emergence of the modern state, the institutions and disciplines of culture and learning, as well as the history of philosophy, the history of historiography, and literary history itself. He offers a powerful account of semiotics; an important critical perspective on narratology; a profound discussion of deconstruction; and many brief, practical demonstrations of why Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, an...
As Noah D. Guynn observes, early French farce has been summarily dismissed as filth for centuries. Renaissance humanists, classical moralists, and Enlightenment philosophes belittled it as an embarrassing reminder of the vulgarity of medieval popular culture. Modern literary critics and theater historians often view it as comedy's poor relation—trite, smutty pap that served to divert the masses and to inure them to lives of subservience. Yet, as Guynn demonstrates in his reexamination of the genre, the superficial crudeness and predictability of farce belie the complexities of its signifying and performance practices and the dynamic, contested nature of its field of reception. Pure Filth f...
DIVClose readings of canonical Spanish “Golden Age” and Latin American “colonial” texts, drawing heavily on the findings and strategies of psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies and Marxism, and offering an understanding of a repres/div