Celestina's Brood

Celestina's Brood
Author: Roberto González Echevarría
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1993
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780822313717

Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores. Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors. By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.

Celestina

Celestina
Author: Fernando de Rojas
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0300156197

A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas's Celestina is a classic of Spanish literature. Second only to Don Quixote in its cultural importance, Rojas's dramatic dialogue presents the elaborate tale of a star-crossed courtship between the young nobleman Calisto and the beautiful maiden Melibea in fifteenth-century Spain. Their unforgettable saga plays out in vibrant exchanges, presented here in a brilliant new translation by award-winning translator Margaret Sayers Peden. After a chance encounter with Melibea leaves Calisto entranced by her charms, he enlists the services of Celestina, an aged prostitute, madam, and procuress, to arrange another meeting. She promptly seizes control of the affair, guiding it through a series of mishaps before it meets its tragic end. At times a comic character and at others a self-assertive promoter of women's sexual license, Celestina is an inimitable personality with a surprisingly modern consciousness, certain to be relished by a new generation of readers.

Celestina and the Ends of Desire

Celestina and the Ends of Desire
Author: E. Michael Gerli
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442694297

One of the most widely-read and translated Spanish works in sixteenth-century Europe was Fernando de Rojas' Celestina, a 1499 novel in dialogue about a couple that faces heartbreak and tragedy after being united by the titular brothel madam. In 'Celestina' and the Ends of Desire, E. Michael Gerli illustrates how this work straddles the medieval and the modern in its exploration of changing categories of human desire - from the European courtly love tradition to the interpretation of want as an insatiable, destructive force. Gerli's analysis draws on a wide range of Celestina scholarship but is unique in its use of modern literary and psychoanalytic theory to confront the problematic links between literature and life. Explorations of influence of desire on knowledge, action, and lived experience connect the work to seismic shifts in the culture of early modern Europe. Engaging and original, 'Celestina' and the Ends of Desire takes a fresh look at the timeless work's widespread appeal and enduring popularity.

The Invention of the Sequel

The Invention of the Sequel
Author: William H. Hinrichs
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1855662329

This book proposes a new way of tracing the history of the Early Modern Spanish novel through the prism of literary continuation. It identifies and examines the Golden Age narratives that invented the sequel and the narrative genres that the sequel in turn invented. This book proposes a new way of tracing the history of the Early Modern Spanish novel through the prism of literary continuation. It identifies and examines the Golden Age narratives that invented the sequel and the narrative genres that the sequel in turn invented. The author explores the rivalries between apocryphal and authorized sequelists that forged modern notions of authorship and authorial property. The book also defines the sequel's forms and functions, filling a major gap in literary theory in general and Peninsular literary studies in particular. Notably, the author demonstrates that the sequel develops first and foremost in Early Modern Spain, an unacknowledged and unexamined contribution to Western letters. With its panoramic scope, this study serves as an introduction to the central novelistic genres and texts of Early Modern Spain. From this foundational starting point, it alsooffers a general framework for understanding imaginative expansion in subsequent time periods and literary traditions. William H. Hinrichs is a founding faculty member and Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Bard High School Early College, Queens.

World Literature in Spanish [3 volumes]

World Literature in Spanish [3 volumes]
Author: Maureen Ihrie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1509
Release: 2011-10-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313080836

Containing roughly 850 entries about Spanish-language literature throughout the world, this expansive work provides coverage of the varied countries, ethnicities, time periods, literary movements, and genres of these writings. Providing a thorough introduction to Spanish-language literature worldwide and across time is a tall order. However, World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia contains roughly 850 entries on both major and minor authors, themes, genres, and topics of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, affording an amazingly comprehensive reference collection in a single work. This encyclopedia describes the growing diversity within national borders, the increasing interdependence among nations, and the myriad impacts of Spanish literature across the globe. All countries that produce literature in Spanish in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia are represented, covering both canonical authors and emerging contemporary writers and trends. Underrepresented writings—such as texts by women writers, queer and Afro-Hispanic texts, children's literature, and works on relevant but less studied topics such as sports and nationalism—also appear. While writings throughout the centuries are covered, those of the 20th and 21st centuries receive special consideration.

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature
Author: M. Hamilton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2007-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230606970

Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature explores the ways Arabic, Jewish and Christian intellectuals in medieval Iberia (courtiers and clerics) adapt and transform the Andalusi go-between figure in order to represent their own role as cultural intermediaries. While these authors are of different religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, they use the go-between, an essential figure in the Andalusi courtly discourse of desire, to open up a secular, more tolerant intellectual space in the face of increasingly fundamentalist currents in their respective cultures. The way this study focuses on the hybrid discourses and identities of medieval Iberia as Muslim, Jewish and Christian responses to continual contact/conflict reflects a methodological approach based in Cultural and Translation Studies.

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures
Author: Beatriz Rivera-Barnes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498596495

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures retraces the “nature of hatred” and the “hatred of nature” from the earliest traditions of Western literature including Biblical texts, Medieval Spanish literature, early Spanish Renaissance texts, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iberian and Latin American literatures. The nature of hate is neither hate in its weakened form, as in disliking or loving less, nor hate in its righteous form, as in “I hate hatred,” rather hate in its primal form as told and conveyed in so many culturally influential Bible stories that are at the root of hatred as it manifests itself today. The hatred of nature is not only contempt for the natural world, but also the idea of nature hating in return, thus inspiring even more hatred of nature. While some chapters, such as the one dedicated to La Celestina, focus more on the nature of hate and the hatred of love, they do address the hatred of nature, as when Celestina conjures Pluto, who happens to be closer to nature than to Satan. Other chapters, such as the ones dedicated to the Latin American novels set in the jungle, focus more on the hatred of nature but ultimately turn to the nature of hatred by analyzing hatred and the descent into madness. In the final chapters Beatriz Rivera-Barnes simultaneously addresses the nature of hatred and the hatred of nature as well as the ecophilia/ecophobia debate in twentieth-century Latin American literatures and considers, if not an assimilation of hate, possibly the cannibalizing of hate.

Mediating Fictions

Mediating Fictions
Author: Jean Dangler
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838754528

"Mediating Fictions examines the variety of strategies that these authors use to deprecate women healers, and in the process, to create early modern "others" to whom the ideal, male physician could be contrasted. Spill, La Celestina, and La Lozana andaluza all attempt to dissuade their readers from seeking the healing service of ordinary women."--BOOK JACKET.

Pornographic Sensibilities

Pornographic Sensibilities
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000264106

Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields—Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume’s embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work.

Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages

Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages
Author: Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2005-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521827317

A collection of original essays exploring the intersections between medieval and postcolonial studies.