Fernando de Rojas' Celestina opens with a conversation between Calisto and Melibea which has puzzled literary scholars. The author of this study supports the view that the scene represents Calisto's dream about his beloved Melibea and examines subsequent works to reach a greater understanding.

This text focuses on the role of history in Julien Gracq's novels, Le Rivage Des Syrtes and Un Balcon En Foret, and in his critical essays. It draws on theories of allegory, textuality and history in its analysis of the interplay of fictional and factual history in Gracq's writings.

A close reading of Andre Gide's three major first-person narratives - L'Immoralist, La Porte etroite and La Symphonie pastorale - through the lens of semiotics and narratology. The author argues Gide's position as a pre-postmodernist who uses narrative strategies to connect story and self.

This study of La Regenta by Alas draws both on psychoanalytic theory and on an understanding of the social, sexual and medical norms of the period in which the novel was written. It proposes that the novel be understood as a coded summary of desire fantasied, dislocated, repudiated and thwarted.

The transformation of Late Petrarchism from earlier stages reflects a profound shift in cultural values--a 'crisis of the Renaissance' that generated new perspectives in poetic theory and practice. Broadly, this book identifies a distinctive 'poetics of inconstancy' that came to the fore at the end of the sixteenth century and pervaded the love verse of the age. At the same time, as a study based on the inductive method, the book takes as its point of departure a single poet: Etienne Durand. Because of his frequently anthologized 'Stances a l'Inconstance, ' Durand is often singled out as 'the...

Examining Ronsard's participation in the paragone debate between poets and painters, this text is broadly concerned with his notions about the differences between poems and pictures - whether therefore it is the poet or painter who holds the highest station in the hierarchy of human creativity.

This collection of 12 essays written in French and English honours Victor Brombert, the humanist, thinker and scholar who taught for many years at Yale and Princeton Universities. The subjects range broadly over the literature, music and paintings of France, Russia, Italy, and Germany.

Drawing on contemporary debates surrounding performance, gender and latin American studies, this book examines representations of performance within dramatic texts. It explores the work of individual playwrights such as Vicente Lenero, and topics including ritual game playing.

Published in two parts in 1548 and 1552, Le Quart Livre is Rabelais's last book of certain authenticity and his most difficult and mysterious work. In it, Pantagruel and Panurge undertake a sea voyage and a quest for "the word of the Divine Bottle," but the islands they visit along the way are inhabited by strange beings whose nature and physiognomy defy natural categories.

Expressing the elderly writer's despair at the failure of all his dreams as a young humanist, the voyage traces the last phase of the heroic quest, the cycle of old age and death. It is a descent into the...

This book undertakes the most comprehensive and theoretically rigorous examination to date of Luis Rafael Sanchez's work in the context of cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and of the international and regional dimensions of Sanchez's work in relation to the unique status of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth and colony. It explores Sanchez's ambivalent position as a member of an intellectual elite, a spokesman for el pueblo, and a Puerto Rican mulatto whose working-class background allows him to highlight unprecedented possibilities for political agency within popular and mass culture....