Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain

Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain
Author: Mary Barnard
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2013-03-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442664282

Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers of the period shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display objects, though in imagined settings, as literary artefacts. These essays examine a variety of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of war, and even enchanted bronze heads. The contributors emphasize how literature preserved and transformed objects to endow them with new meaning for aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes ­– whether to perpetuate certain habits of thought and belief, or to challenge accepted social and moral norms.

Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879-1926

Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879-1926
Author: Christine Arkinstall
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442647655

Explores the contributions of three female free-thinkers to the development of feminist consciousness and democracy, examining their lives and works to discover their contributions to the Generation of 1898 in Spain.

Beyond Sight

Beyond Sight
Author: Ryan D. Giles
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487500033

Beyond Sight, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, explores the ways in which Iberian writers crafted images of both Old and New Worlds using the non-visual senses (hearing, smell, taste, and touch). The contributors argue that the uses of these senses are central to understanding Iberian authors and thinkers from the pre- and early modern periods. Medievalists delve into the poetic interiorizations of the sensorial plane to show how sacramental and purportedly miraculous sensory experiences were central to the effort of affirming faith and understanding indigenous peoples in the Americas. Renaissance and early modernist essays shed new light on experiences of pungent, bustling ports and city centres, and the exotic musical performances of empire. This insightful collection covers a wide array of approaches including literary and cultural history, philosophical aesthetics, affective and cognitive studies, and theories of embodiment. Beyond Sight expands the field of sensory studies to focus on the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies from historical, literary, and cultural perspectives.

Ficino in Spain

Ficino in Spain
Author: Susan Byrne
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2015-07-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442624086

As the first translator of Plato’s complete works into Latin, the Florentine writer Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and his blend of Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy were fundamental to the intellectual atmosphere of the Renaissance. In Spain, his works were regularly read, quoted, and referenced, at least until the nineteenth century, when literary critics and philosophers wrote him out of the history of early modern Spain. In Ficino in Spain, Susan Byrne uses textual and bibliographic evidence to show the pervasive impact of Ficino’s writings and translations on the Spanish Renaissance. Cataloguing everything from specific mentions of his name in major texts to glossed volumes of his works in Spanish libraries, Byrne shows that Spanish writers such as Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Garcilaso de la Vega all responded to Ficino and adapted his imagery for their own works. An important contribution to the study of Spanish literature and culture from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ficino in Spain recovers the role that Hermetic and Neoplatonic thought played in the world of Spanish literature.

A Planetary Avant-Garde

A Planetary Avant-Garde
Author: Ignacio Infante
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442629762

A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal across particular avant-garde networks, expanding our understanding of Western colonial and imperial ideologies of the early twentieth century. The book extends geopolitical dimensions of the historical avant-garde into a wider transnational and planetary framework, including divergent experiences of modernity, forms of experimental poetics, and understandings of history. It sheds light on topics, such as the relation between Portuguese futurism and European colonialism in West Africa, the Latin American avant-garde’s critique of European historicism, the development of Brazilian modernism in relation to the European avant-garde, the comparative poetics of modernism in the Philippines, and the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Grounded in extensive archival research, A Planetary Avant-Garde provides a new understanding of the historical avant-garde from a global and multilingual perspective.

The Spanish Arcadia

The Spanish Arcadia
Author: Javier Irigoyen-García
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442647272

The Spanish Arcadia analyzes the figure of the shepherd in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, exploring its centrality to the discourses on racial, cultural, and religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including theological polemics on blood purity, political treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, historiography, paintings, epic poems, and Spanish ballads, Javier Irigoyen-García argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity. The Spanish Arcadia contextualizes pastoral romances within a broader framework and assesses how they inform other cultural manifestations. In doing so, Irigoyen-García provides incisive new ideas about the social and ethnocentric uses of the genre, as well as its interrelation with ideas of race, animal husbandry, and nation building in early modern Spain.

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain
Author: Enrique Fernandez
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442648864

Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain brings the study of Europe's "culture of dissection" to the Iberian peninsula, presenting a neglected episode in the development of the modern concept of the self. Enrique Fernandez explores the ways in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century anatomical research stimulated both a sense of interiority and a fear of that interior's exposure and punishment by the early modern state. Examining works by Miguel de Cervantes, María de Zayas, Fray Luis de Granada, and Francisco de Quevedo, Fernandez highlights the existence of narratives in which the author creates a surrogate self on paper, then "dissects" it. He argues that these texts share a fearful awareness of having a complex inner self in a country where one's interiority was under permanent threat of punitive exposure by the Inquisition or the state. A sophisticated analysis of literary, religious, and medical practice in early modern Spain, Fernandez's work will interest scholars working on questions of early modern science, medicine, and body politics.

The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes

The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes
Author: Aaron M. Kahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191060577

Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain
Author: Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2019-03-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1487504055

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors tackle subjects and disciplines as diverse as alchemy, optics, astronomy, acoustics, geometry, mechanics, and mathematics to reveal how theatre could be used to deploy scientific knowledge. While Science on Stage contributes to cultural and performance studies it also engages with issues of censorship, the effect of the Spanish Inquisition on the circulation of ideas, and the influence of the Eastern traditions in Spain.

Fashioning Spanish Cinema

Fashioning Spanish Cinema
Author: Jorge Pérez
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-07-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1487539746

Costume design is a crucial, but frequently overlooked, aspect of film that fosters an appreciation of the diverse ways in which film and fashion enrich each other. These influential industries offer representations of ideas, values, and beliefs that shape and construct cultural identities. In Fashioning Spanish Cinema, Jorge Pérez analyses the use of clothing and fashion as costumes within Spanish cinema, paying particular attention to the significance of those costumes in relation to the visual styles and the narratives of the films. The author examines the links between costume analysis and other fields and theoretical frameworks such as fashion studies, the history of dress, celebrity studies, and gender and feminist studies. Fashioning Spanish Cinema looks at instances in which costumes are essential to shaping the public image of stars, such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, Victoria Abril, and Penélope Cruz. Focusing on examples in which costumes have discursive autonomy, it explores how costumes engage with broader issues of identity and, relatedly, how costumes impact everyday practices and fashion trends beyond cinema. Drawing on case studies from multiple periods, films by contemporary directors and genres, and red-carpet events such as the Oscars and Goya Awards, Fashioning Spanish Cinema contributes a pivotal Spanish perspective to expanding interdisciplinary work on the intersections between film and fashion.