Posthumously published to wide acclaim, "The Lettered City "is a vitally important work by one of Latin America s most highly respected theorists. Angel Rama s groundbreaking study presented here in its first English translation provides an overview of the power of written discourse in the historical formation of Latin American societies, and highlights the central role of cities in deploying and reproducing that power. To impose order on a vast New World empire, the Iberian monarchs created carefully planned cities where institutional and legal powers were administered through a specialized...

Explores the ways in which large historic processes--e.g., the technological mastery of nature, a world-wide market economy--and important events in the lives of individual authors interact to affect the representation of character in the English Renaissa

From the pre-Socratics to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, this title traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature.

Presents an analysis of texts that accompanied European commercial and imperial expansion from the Glorious Revolution through the French Revolution. This book considers such texts as Behn's "Oroonoko", Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" and "Captain Singleton", and Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". It is suitable for scholars engaged in post colonial studies.

The Chinese ideogram chi is far richer in connotation than the equivalent English verb to eat. Chi can also be read as the mouth that begs for food and words. A concept manifest in the twentieth-century Chinese political reality of revolution and massacre, chi suggests a narrative of desire that moves from lack to satiation and back again. In China such fundamental acts as eating or refusing to eat can carry enormous symbolic weight. This book examines the twentieth-century Chinese political experience as it is represented in literature through hunger, cooking, eating,...