Tracing the beginnings of a bourgeois literature in Golden Age Spain, Francisco Sanchez examines works by Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), major picaresque texts--particularly Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache (1599-1604)--and contemporary writings in which political economists and jurists look at new economic and political circumstances.

Using the term republica to describe an economic sphere of social life under the constrictions of both the monarchy and the privileges of the seignorial system, Sanchez investigates notions of person,...

This book examines poetic adaptations of painterly techniques in works by writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Andre Breton, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery--all chosen for the experimentalism of their poetry as well as for the quality of their critical writings on art. Close attention is paid to essays on painters identified with Cubism, Futurism, and Dada-Surrealism in France and with Abstract Expressionism and New Realism in the United States.

Selected poems are examined in light of the critical essays and are taken either as illustrations of a new plastic poetic...

Why is science often considered the opposite of literature? Lars O. Erickson examines the relationship between these two fields in eighteenth-century France and finds that the major intellectual and scientific transitions of the period can be better understood by paying attention to literary developments, particularly in genres not traditionally associated with learned societies. Erickson examines works by Diderot and Maupertuis and identifies a shared renegade spirit he calls "essayistic science." He demonstrates how the essay, a vague genre characterized by an openness to lay audiences, a...

In an examination of eyewitness travel writing in thirteenth- through sixteenth-century France, Andrea Frisch studies the figure of the witness at a historical juncture and in a cultural context in which that figure is generally thought to have begun to assume a recognizably modern form and function. Whereas most accounts of early modern travel literature tend to read modern presuppositions about witnessing and testimony back into the material, Frisch approaches the early modern witness in terms of the cultural legacy of the Middle Ages. Through primary readings in law and theology, Frisch...

By analyzing testimonial writing, works of fiction, and critical theory, Joanna Bartow examines the self-representation of testimonial subjects. She questions limits on reading testimonio that until recently have delegitimated the testimonial subject's autonomy. In addition, Bartow shows the importance of a feminist perspective on testimonio, a perspective met with some resistance. In specific ways, feminist theory sheds light on the construction of the testimonial subject, and testimonial writing highlights questions of agency across differences in feminist theory. Subject...

Noting significant differences between the individual tragedies of Racine and the many current notions of what "Racinian tragedy" is deemed to imply, John Campbell explores the identity and meaning of the modern "Racine." He asks if any one critical paradigm, propounded to explain what is commonly called "Racinian tragedy," even permits a convincing interpretation of any single play. He expresses skepticism as to whether the various tragedies can together constitute a body of work methodologically and ideologically cohesive enough to demonstrate any set of clearly identifiable patterns....

Reading the Exemplum Right situates Juan Manuel at the apex of the European literary tradition of the exemplum and demonstrates how he puts the coercive power and authority of the illustrative tale on display for his audience. Following the medieval modes of reading and writing that structure Juan Manuel's text, Jonathan Burgoyne uncovers a rhetorical lesson woven into the entire five-part Conde Lucanor that lays bare the inherent ambivalence of the exemplum as a narrative sign. Burgoyne then traces the earliest response to Juan Manuel's work as it can be uncovered...

This is the first complete edition of an anonymous late medieval Catalan translation of Italian writer Bernardo Illicino's commentary on Petrarch's Triumphs. Although the translation of Illicino's commentary is considered a classic of Catalan prose by scholars, until now, no one has undertaken the task of preparing a complete edition because of the complexity of the prose, and because the original manuscript survives in two pieces in two different libraries: the National Library of France in Paris and the Ateneu in Barcelona. The original document, reproduced here, represented the...

Influenced by trends in medicine, town planning and social etiquette, Madrid's middle class viewed urban growth with apprehension in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Mapping the Social Body, Collin McKinney examines manifestations and critiques of that reaction in the work of Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest modern novelist. Drawing on a wide range of recent cultural theory as well as contemporary non-literary texts, this book provides modern readers with a metatextual map of Galdos's Madrid and Spanish society as they experienced urbanisation.

In a century...

Driven by a dual analysis, Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain looks at French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in Spain--his more or less direct influence on Spanish letters--and also at Bergsonism in Spain--the more indirect resonance with his methodological posture--articulated through Spanish texts as well as theoretical approaches to film and urban space. Through this twin investigation, one part historical and the other part methodological, Benjamin Fraser seeks to broaden the scope of interest in Bergson's philosophy, to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of Bergson's...