Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Spanish & Portuguese

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. G....

The fictional Don Quixote was constantly defeated in his knightly adventures. In writing Quixote's story, however, Miguel Cervantes succeeded in a different kind of quest -- the creation of a modern novel that 'conquers' and assimilates countless literary genres. Don Quixote among the Saracens considers how Cervantes's work reflects the clash of civilizations and anxieties towards cultural pluralism that permeated Golden Age Spain.

Frederick A. de Armas unravels an essential mystery of one of world literature's best known figures: why Quixote sets out to revive knight...

Federico Garcia Lorca (1889-1936) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century; Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is Spain's most performed composer of the same period. The two were very different - Lorca was gay, liberal, and a member of the avant garde, while Falla was a devout Catholic - yet they had a profound mutual influence. The two developed an intimate friendship, which ended when Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Lorca in Tune with Falla is the first book to trace Lorca's impact on Falla's...

Winner, 2015 LAJSA Best Book in Latin American Jewish Studies
The practices of interrogation, torture, and confession have resurfaced in public debates since the early 2000s following human rights abuses around the globe. Yet discussion of torture has remained restricted to three principal fields: the legal, the pragmatic, and the moral, eclipsing the less immediate but vital question of what torture "does.""Figurative Inquisitions" seeks to correct this lacuna by approaching the question of torture from a literary vantage point.

This book investigates the uncanny presence of the...