The source of the narrative energy that creates such absorbing stories.

Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century. Shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by Andre Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1929) one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. The Forgotten Ones (1950) and He (1952), made in Mexico, were followed, from 1960, in Spain and France, by the films for which he is best known: Viridiana...

This book is the only one of its kind in English. Part literary history, part literary criticism, it is above all a personal assessment of a rich and important body of work which is still not widely known outside Catalonia. Catalan literature, one of the three major Peninsular literatures, reached an impressive level of excellence in the middle ages, beginning with Ramon Llull and the chronicles, and culminating in the two great fifteenth-century writers, the poet Ausias March and Joanot Martorell, the author of Tirant lo Blanc, one of the landmarks in early prose fiction. After three...

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and...

Spain's artistic Golden Age produced Cervantes's great novel, Don Quijote, the sublime poetry of Quevedo and Gongora, and nurtured the prodigious talent of Velazquez, and yet it was the theatre that captured the imagination of its people. Men and women of all social classes flocked to the new playhouses to see and hear the latest offerings of their favourite dramatists, and to be seen and heard. As well as dealing with the lives and major works of the most significant playwrights of the period - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Miguel de Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca - the Companion focusses...

Latin American cinema has seen major developments in the past half-century, and some of the most exciting work in contemporary film now originates there. This Companion traces its development from the mid 1890s, with particular attention to the early period when it was dominated by foreign film makers (or foreign models such as Hollywood), through the 1960s when as a genre it found its feet - the New Latin American Cinema movement - and beyond. Detailed analysis of the best twenty-five films of Latin America follows: cast and crew, awards, plots, themes and techniques. The 'Guide to Further...

A Companion to Latin American Literature offers a lively and informative introduction to the most significant literary works produced in Latin America from the fifteenth century until the present day. It shows how the press, and its product the printed word, functioned as the common denominator binding together, in different ways over time, the complex and variable relationship between the writer, the reader and the state. The meandering story of the evolution of Latin American literature - from the letters of discovery written by Christopher Columbus and Vaz de Caminha, via the Republican...

A Companion to Federico Garcia Lorca provides a clear, critical appraisal of the issues and debates surrounding the work of Spain's most celebrated poet and dramatist. It considers past and current approaches to the study of Lorca, and also suggests new directions for further investigation. An introduction on the often contentious subject of Lorca's biography is followed by five chapters - poetry, theatre, music, drawing and cinema - which together acknowledge the polymath in Lorca. A further three chapters - religion, gender and sexuality, and politics - complete the volume by covering...

This new Companion to Magical Realism provides an assessment of the world-wide impact of a movement which was incubated in Germany, flourished in Latin America and then spread to the rest of the world. It provides a set of up-to-date assessments of the work of writers traditionally associated with magical realism such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in particular his recently published memoirs), Alejo Carpentier, Miguel ngel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel and Salman Rushdie, as well as bringing into the fold new authors such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Jose Saramago, Dorit...

This Companion volume traces the evolution of the major creative aspects of Mexican culture from pre-Columbian times to the present. Dealing in turn with the cultures of Mesoamerica, the colonial period, the onset of independence and the modern era, the author explores Aztec arts, the role of the performing arts in the process of evangelisation, manifestations of cultural dependence, of the search for national identity, and the struggle for modernity, drawing examples from such diverse activities as architecture, painting, music, dance, literature, film and media. There is also a brief...