Journey to the Alcarria

Journey to the Alcarria
Author: Camilo José Cela
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1990
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9780871133793

Awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, Camilo José Cela has long been recognized as one of the preeminent Spanish writers of the twentieth century. Journey to the Alcarria is the best known of his vagabundajes, Cela's term for his books of travels, sketchbooks of regions or provinces. The Alcarria is a territory in New Castile, northeast of Madrid, surrounding most of the Guadalajara province. The region is high, rocky, and dry, and is famous for its honey. Cela himself is "the traveler," an urban intellectual wandering from village to village, through farms and along country roads, in search of the Spanish character. Cela relishes his encounters with the simple, honest people of the Spanish countryside--the blushing maid in the tavern, the small-town shopkeeper with airs of grandeur lonely for companionship, the old peasant with his donkey who freely shares his bread and blanket with the stranger. These vignettes are narrated in a fresh, clear prose that is wonderfully evocative. As the New York Times wrote, Cela is "an outspoken observer of human life who built his reputation on portraying what he observed in a direct colloquial style."

Old Spain and New Spain

Old Spain and New Spain
Author: David Henn
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2004
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780838640159

This is the first, book-length study of the six travel narratives published by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literatures. Preliminary chapters focus on technical and thematic aspects of travel-writing, and on the author's approach to the genre. Cela's travel works, which appeared between 1948 and 1986, are examined in turn, with a focus on the construction of the narratives and also on the themes that are developed in each of them. There is an assessment of the author's treatment of topographical, cultural, historical, and social material in his accounts of the journeys he made through various areas and regions of Spain, as well as a consideration of the way in which these narratives reflect changes taking place in Spain during the Franco regime and in the decade following the dictator's death. David Henn teaches modern Spanish fiction, drama, and travel literature at University College London.

Literature of Travel and Exploration: A to F

Literature of Travel and Exploration: A to F
Author: Jennifer Speake
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2003
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781579584252

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Mazurka for Two Dead Men

Mazurka for Two Dead Men
Author: Camilo José Cela
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0811225658

A New York Times Best Book of the Year Nobel Prize Laureate Mazurka for Two Dead Men, the culmination of Camilo José Cela‘s literary art, opens in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War: Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends, his brother avenges his death. For both deaths, the blind accordion player Gaudencio plays the same mazurka. Set in backward rural Galicia, Cela’s excellent novel portrays a reign of fools, and works like contrapuntal music, its themes calling and responding, alternately brutal, melancholy, funny, lyrical, and coarse.

An Inward Journey

An Inward Journey
Author: Fran Zabaleta
Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2020-04-04
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1071540122

THE STORY OF AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY BY CAMPER VAN THROUGH THE FORGOTTEN HEART OF SPAIN. Do I really know my own country? That's what I asked myself a year ago ... and the answer surprised me. Yes, I had been to many locations. I was very familiar with the outer edges of the peninsula, but the interior was a huge black hole pierced here and there by the lights of some city. So I set out to remedy it. I bought a van adapted as a home and I went to explore the interior of Spain. For eighty days I visited villages, castles, natural parks and archaeological sites, talked with people, researched a thousand stories and looked out into a world that was curiously familiar and, at the same time, completely unknown. The result is in your hands: an approach to the history, geography and present day realities of a country which is much larger, richer and more complex than we were ever told. A country that overflows with a rich heritage and an archaeological, historical and cultural wealth, full of amazing nooks and crannies, but also depopulated and lonely. A deeply beautiful country that is truly worth the effort of exploring in depth, getting lost in its innermost recesses and diving into its extraordinary past. Will you come with me on a voyage through this forgotten Spain?

Literature of Travel and Exploration

Literature of Travel and Exploration
Author: Jennifer Speake
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1425
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135456631

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Hemingway & Franco

Hemingway & Franco
Author: Douglas Edward Laprade
Publisher: Universitat de València
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-11-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 8437083567

Este volumen es un análisis fundamental para entender los lazos del escritor norteamericano con la España republicana y su posterior acogida, durante los años de postguerra, por parte del gobierno del general Franco. Los primeros tres capítulos examinan las alusiones literarias e históricas de algunas de sus obras en referencia a España, su relación política y literaria con Rafael Alberti y la recepción del escritor a la luz de su ideología. Los últimos cinco capítulos ofrecen y explican los documentos españoles, depositados en el Archivo General de la Administración en Alcalá de Henares, que testimonian cómo el gobierno franquista siempre consideró a Hemingway un escritor comunista y, por tanto, peligroso y objeto de censura.

The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy
Author: Raymond Carr
Publisher: Phoenix
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781842122037

Raymond Carr's succinct and elegant volume is recognised as the classic account of the war, 'brother against brother', which established the Franco regime in Spain. Carr focuses on the disparities in Spanish society, between classes and the regions, and within these between centralists and separatists. He exposes the pitiful weaknesses of the political parties, which enabled Franco, 'the iron surgeon', to overthrow Catalan separatists and proletarian socialists alike. It was a war in which the riven country of Spain became the battleground of international forces, a war which aroused the fiercest political passions, and which became the vicious preliminary skirmish in the great clash of ideologies fought out in World War Two.

East Along the Equator

East Along the Equator
Author: Helen Winternitz
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1987
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9780871131621

In this brilliant mix of political journalism and travel writing, Helen Winternitz and fellow journalist Timothy Phelps witness what few Westerners have: life in the ecologically rich but financially impoverished American-backed dictatorship of Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.