In this ground-breaking study, Anne Cruz examines the treatment of poverty, prostitution, war, and other social concerns in the cultural and literary discourses of early modern Spain. This book investigates the polemics on poor relief through religious charity and secularized reform articulated not only in the Spanish picaresque canon - Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzm?n de Alfarache, El busc3/4n - but also in female picaresque narratives and soldiers' tales. Emphasizing Bakhtin's notion that discursive practices must be assessed as they intersect and become textualized in history, the book also...

This study takes a fresh look at the picaresque genre as seen in three important contemporary Latin American novels, Cortazar's Libro de Manuel, Skarmeta's Match Ball, and the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. Gordana Yovanovich considers the genre in relation to the concept of play and shows how the traditional picaresque genre has been replaced by a distinctly modern version.

Play and the Picaresque contends that within Latin American culture humour and play serve as forms of empowerment and means of survival for those who are...

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques R?da. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric.

Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate,...

In Proust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers proposes a new approach to A la recherche du temps perdu that centres on the role of affect. Through close reading of the hero-narrator's personal history, the author shows how emotional paradigms (especially separation anxiety), involuntary memory, and other compelling impressions give focus and structure to Proust's novel. Drawing on reader-oriented and emotion theories, she shows how affect commands the attention of the 'motivated reader' and is crucial to the process of self-understanding for both the narrator and the...

Exorcism and demonic possession appear as recurrent motifs in early modern Spanish and English literatures. In Exorcism and Its Texts, Hilaire Kallendorf demonstrates how this 'infection' was represented in some thirty works of literature by fifteen different authors, ranging from canonical classics like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ben Jonson, and Lope de Vega, to obscure works by anonymous writers.

From comic and tragic drama to picaresque narrative and eight other genres, possession worked as a paradigm through which authors could convey extraordinary experience, including not...

Born in Mexico City in 1914, writer, poet, and diplomat Octavio Paz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990, eight years before his death in 1998. The Writing in the Stars explores Paz's life and ideas by establishing a dialogue between the structure and recurring images of his major poems and the ideas of Carl Jung.

Although other literary critics have pointed to Jungian concepts in Paz, a comprehensive study on the subject has yet to be undertaken. Rodney Williamson takes up this challenge, adopting a Jungian perspective to explore successive phases of Paz's poetry....

The multifaceted and labyrinthine oeuvre of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is distinguished by having been written and published under more than seventy different names. These were not mere pseudonyms, but what Pessoa termed 'heteronyms, ' fully realized identities possessed not only of wildly divergent writing styles and opinions, but also of detailed biographies. In many cases, their independent existences extended to their publication of letters and critical readings of each other's works (and those of Pessoa 'himself').

Long acclaimed in continental Europe and...

It is no accident that some variation of the question 'What should I do?' appears in over three-quarters of the comedic plays of the Spanish Golden Age. Casuistical dialogue was a concern, even an obsession, of Spanish playwrights during the seventeenth century, many of whom were educated by Jesuit casuists. Conscience on Stage is a study of casuistry or case morality as the foundation for a poetics of seventeenth-century Spanish comedias.

Hilaire Kallendorf examines the Jesuit upbringing and casuistical education of major playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age, many of whom were also...

French authors in the eighteenth century traditionally used music to enhance literary love scenes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considerably expanded contemporary notions of music's expressive power, yet distinguished between the capacity of different nations and sexes to wield it. Rousseau's controversial statements led his readers to interrogate the relationship between music, meaning, and morality. They depicted their resistance to his claims in musical tableaux, or musical performances staged for a beholder inscribed within the text. Tili Boon Cuille's Narrative Interludes chronicles the...