This book explores the change that occurred in the writings of Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos when he entered his segunda manera in 1881 with the publication of La desheredada, his first contemporary novel. Critical work on this important phase of Galdos's career has tended to concentrate on the content of his novels, with little attention given to the way in which Galdos conveys that content to the reader. By studying these works in light of how their stories are told, Linda Willem shows that La desheredada marks the beginning of a more sophisticated and varied...

According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where interlocutors are almost always reduced to anonymity. In this book, Rigolot analyzes the poet's multiple strategies of dialogue, capturing his conversations with a surprising range of people--from biblical figures and ancient Greek and Roman authors to artists as diverse as Dante and Shakespeare, Chateaubriand and Hugo, Audubon, Whitman, Poe,...

This book, written in Spanish, focuses on the literary and artistic works of such avant-garde figures as Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Benjamin Jarnes, Antonio de Obregon, Juan Chabas, Rosa Chacel, Claudio de la Torre, Almada Negreiros, Maruja Mallo, Mauricio Amster, Manuel Reinoso, Diego Rivera, and Angeles Santos y Victorio Macho. It identifies the attempt to integrate conflicting epistemological, ethical, and sociopolitical categories as the organizational principle driving the avant-garde novel and art. Seen as a means of escaping the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, the conflict between...

This book examines literary representations of various art forms in a series of major texts from the Romantic period of French literature (1800-1850). There has been considerable recent critical interest in intermediality--and specifically in ekphrasis, or the verbal representation of a visual work--in Western European literature, but little attention has been given to French writers in this tradition. French poets and novelists made a concerted effort, however, to develop interarts relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, even before Baudelaire articulated his famous concept of...

Fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental fiction can be described as a palimpsest, a dense web of entangled, faded readings and a challenge to the reader. While the parameters of writing sentimental fiction and its textuality have been explored with great success, its readers and how they approached these works have been largely neglected.

Based on a reconstruction of the medical notion of love-as-sickness, premodern reading habits, and interpretive strategies, this book approaches canonical works of sentimental romance from the perspective of a medical-sensitive reader. An analysis of...

While the plays of classical France achieve an unprecedented scenic perfection, what ultimately distinguishes classical drama is its unique awareness of its literary properties: the canny excavation of its resources as the site, instrument, and product of a concerted act of writing. But this self-conscious literariness also bears witness to the era's corollary awareness of the predicament in which even great art works stand as the occasion and counterpart of a critical, often ironic act of reading. In "inventing," that is, creating and discovering, the text as a vehicle of self-determining...