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

When confronting twentieth-century political oppression and violence, writers and artists in Portugal and South America have often emphasized the complex relationship between freedom and tyranny. In Seeing Politics Otherwise, Patricia Vieira uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interrelation of politics and representations of vision and blindness in Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and art.

Vieira's discussion focuses on three literary works: Graciliano Ramos's Memoirs of Prison, Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, and Jose...

In the nineteenth century, the Cuban economy rested on the twin pillars of sugar and slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1886, but, one hundred years later, Cuban authors were still writing antislavery narratives. William Luis explores this seeming paradox in his groundbreaking study Literary Bondage, asking why this literary genre has remained a viable means of expression.

Applying Foucault's theory of counter-discourse to a vast body of antislavery literature, Luis shows how these narratives have always served to undermine the foundations of slavery, to protest the...

Symbol and psyche are twin concepts in contemporary symbological studies, where the symbol is considered to be a "statement" by the psyche. The psyche is a manifold of conscious and unconscious contents, and the symbol is their mediator. Because Lorca's dramatic characters are psychic entities made up of both conscious and unconscious elements, they unfold, grow, and meet their fate in a dense realm of shifting symbols.

In Psyche and Symbol in the Theater of Federico Garcia Lorca, Rupert Allen analyzes symbologically three dramatic works of Lorca. He has found...

The dream of "progress" that animated many nineteenth-century artistic and political movements gave way at the turn of the century to a dissatisfaction with the Industrial Civilization and a recurrent pessimism about a future dominated by mechanization. Art Nouveau, which was both a style and a movement, embodied this dissatisfaction, marking the turn-of-the-century period with an aesthetic that consciously set out to revolutionize literature, the arts, and society within the framework of a brutalizing, wildly burgeoning Industrial Civilization. Generally associated with northern European...

Max Aub (1903-1972) ist einer der groen Unbekannten der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts: Abgeschnitten von seinen Lesern schrieb er wie viele republikanische Autoren im Exil, und rezipiert wird heute meist nur der Burgerkriegszyklus Das Magische Labyrinth und der Kunstlerroman Jusep Torres Campalans. Dabei gibt sein Werk hochst differenzierte Antworten auf zentrale Fragen der spanischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts: Welche Entwicklung durchliefen die Avantgarden der zwanziger und dreiiger Jahre im vier Jahrzehnte dauernden Exil, und welchen Weg fanden sie zuruck nach...