Reading La Regenta

Reading La Regenta
Author: Stephanie A. Sieburth
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 150
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789027217448

Criticism of La Regenta has until recently focused on the text's plot as an extraordinarily coherent and convincing fictional world. Stephanie A. Sieburth demonstrates that the devices which produce order in the text are counterbalanced by an equally strong tendency toward entropy of meaning. The narrator is shown to be duplicitous and unreliable in his judgments on characters and events. Without an omniscient narrator, readers must interpret for themselves the complex intertextual structure of the novel. Saints' lives, honor plays, and serial novels each provide partial reflections of Ana Ozores' story. The text becomes a collage of mutually reflecting segments which, like Ana in her moments of self-doubt and madness, ultimately question the function of language and of any overriding interpretation or meaning.

La Regenta

La Regenta
Author: John Rutherford
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 1046
Release: 2005-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0141960760

Married to the retired magistrate of Vetusta, Ana Ozores cares deeply for her much older husband but feels stifled by the monotony of her life in the shabby and conservative provincial town. And when she embarks on a quest for fulfillment through religion and even adultery, a bitter struggle begins between a powerful priest and a would-be Don Juan for the passionate young woman's body and soul. Scandalizing contemporary Spain when it was first published in 1885, with its searing critique of the Church and its frank treatment of sex, La Regenta is a compelling and witty depiction of the complacent and frivolous world of upper-class society.

Realism as Resistance

Realism as Resistance
Author: Denise DuPont
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780838756386

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdos's first series of Episodios Nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)'s La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixotism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.

Don Juan and the Point of Honor

Don Juan and the Point of Honor
Author: James Mandrell
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780271040721

In Don Juan and the Point of Honor, James Mandrell undertakes a systematic examination of the many questions surrounding the legendary character. What emerges is a view of Don Juan as a positive social force in patriarchal society and culture. Mandrell shows that Don Juan should not be treated as an innocent or outmoded cultural artifact.

Encyclopedia of the Novel

Encyclopedia of the Novel
Author: Paul Schellinger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 838
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135918260

The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.

Focus and Background in Romance Languages

Focus and Background in Romance Languages
Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2009-06-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027289522

Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.

Negotiating Sainthood

Negotiating Sainthood
Author: Kathy Bacon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351195778

"This study demonstrates the previously unrecognised significance of discourses of saintliness for constructions of gender and national identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Spanish culture.a Kathy Bacons innovative approach to sainthood leads to fresh readings of texts by Spains three principal realist novelists: La familia de Leon Roch and Nazarin (Benito Perez Galdos, 1878 and 1895), La Regenta (Leopoldo Alas, 1884-85), and Dulce dueno (Emilia Pardo Bazan, 1911).a The author challenges the conventional distinction between anti-clerical and spiritual novels by these writers, and questions previous feminist assumptions about the negative role of religion for female identity.aSainthood emerges as a key theme through which texts grapple with Spains difficult transition to modernity."

Writing Teresa

Writing Teresa
Author: Denise DuPont
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2011-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611484073

Writing Teresa: The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jesús “boom” of roughly 1880–1930, and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period’s interest in the Saint from Ávila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.

Self-conscious Art

Self-conscious Art
Author: Susan L. Fischer
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838753248

Self-conscious art constitutes a significant and previously neglected feature of modern literature and is a crucial concern of contemporary criticism. The essays in this volume consider such questions as the limits of self-consciousness, the creative and circumstantial tensions that produce its various features, the ludic nature of art, the role of interpretation, and the aesthetic, social, and mythic reverberations of self-reflexive art.