This study of the social content of the only surviving Spanish epic provides a means of assessing the motives and intentions of the protagonist and of other characters. Chapters are devoted to such themes as the multifarious significance of kinship and lineage, with special attention to the role of fathers, uncles, and cousins in the world of clan loyalties; amity as a system of fictive kinship, personal honor, and public organization; the importance of women, and the meaning and function of marriage, dowry, and related practices; the emergence of the polity as a rivalry of social, legal, and...

Between 1585 and 1631, the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote more than forty-five plays dealing with the theme of conjugal honor. Drawing on recent feminist theories and touching on literary, social, and anthropological aspects, Professor Yarbro-Rejarano demonstrates that hierarchical relations of gender, race, and social status mutually inform one another as structuring principles of these plays. She takes into account plays that reveal their conventional, formulaic views of the Christian feminine ideal as well as those whose variety and flexibility present women subverting their...

Michel Tournier, member of the Acadimie Goncourt and one of the most influential French writers of the post-Nouveau roman period, stresses the crucial interrelationship that exists between myth and literature. It is the writer's duty, he states, to keep myths alive by continually renewing and transforming them, re-releasing them in an ever changing social context. Written in French, this study considers the Tournier novel as the story of a voyage in a literal and figurative sense. Jonathan Krell uses the term elementary to characterize this voyage through the universe of Tournier's...

By analyzing a varied body of writing- hagiographies, histories, treatises, and correspondence- in the context of religious colonial culture and European mercantilism, Mario Cesareo shows how Portuguese and Spanish missionaries created a Christian understanding of the colonial process. The material excess of the colonial world, experienced as a capricious parade of signs, masks, objects, races, languages, and bodies subjected to European exploitation, presented a problem of the first magnitude for Christian missionaries. In order to render intelligible the incongruities of the colonial...

Plotting the Past stands out as a serious work marked by sharp analytical skills and an unusual breadth of subject matter encompassing questions of genre and ideology that are central to present-day critical discourses.-Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian ...Coletta has given us a book that is engaging, challenging, and astute. For its mature historical sense and theoretical refinement, Plotting the Past deserves high praise.-CLIO

Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is generally acknowledged to be the master author of autos sacramentales, one-act pageant plays that usually dramatize the myths of the Fall and Redemption. Since the auto was supervised by both the church and the state, it is typically held to be an art form that serves theology and the dominant powers of the time. Basing her examination of Calderon's autos on modern theories of allegory, Viviana Diaz Balsera focuses on the seductive power of the dramatic, visible level of the allegorical auto and questions the widely held assumption that Calderon's...

In this book the author gets to the very core of what makes a successful and dynamic enterprise. Building upon his earlier work, The Ascendant Organization, and slaying a number of business fads and sacred cows along the way, he shows how to energize the enterprise in key areas such as leadership, teamwork, and innovation. With the use of many examples and cases and building upon considerable experience he shows the way forward for companies to achieve a sense of purpose and to energize their organizations. If you are tired of the latest business fad, then this will be the book for you.

In French literary history Nicolas Boileau (1636-1701) has enjoyed legendary status as the great codifier of French classicism, the discerning critic who could demolish or elevate several generations of French poets. This view of Boileau's role has lead to an emphasis on his poetics, not his poems, which in turn has generated general disdain for his poetic art. Robert Corum dispels these misconceptions about Boileau by focusing rigorous critical attention on Boileau's first nine Satires and the accompanying Discours au toy, 11 composed between 1657 and 1668. His reading takes into account a...

According to Rogers, the nineteenth century was incapable of managing the feminine question and preferred to mythicize it. Everything that was related to it, especially feminine sexuality, was transformed into fiction. Thus women were saddled with the role of scapegoat.