Conquistadores

Conquistadores
Author: Fernando Cervantes
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101981261

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world “The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more impressive is the analytical skill Cervantes applies. . . . [He] conveys complex arguments in delightfully simple language, and most importantly knows how to tell a good story.” —The Times (London) Over the few short decades that followed Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean in 1492, Spain conquered the two most powerful civilizations of the Americas: the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of Peru. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and the other explorers and soldiers that took part in these expeditions dedicated their lives to seeking political and religious glory, helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. But centuries later, these conquistadors have become the stuff of nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation as men who decimated ancient civilizations and carried out horrific atrocities in their pursuit of gold and glory. In Conquistadores, acclaimed Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes—himself a descendent of one of the conquistadors—cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to help us better understand the context that gave rise to the conquistadors' actions. Drawing upon previously untapped primary sources that include diaries, letters, chronicles, and polemical treatises, Cervantes immerses us in the late-medieval, imperialist, religious world of 16th-century Spain, a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadors themselves. His thought-provoking, illuminating account reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World and the half-century that irrevocably altered the course of history.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Publisher:
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1901
Genre:
ISBN:

America

America
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 792
Release: 1914
Genre:
ISBN:

What Would Cervantes Do?

What Would Cervantes Do?
Author: David Castillo
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2022-01-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0228009316

The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 was a tragic illustration of the existential threat that the viral spread of disinformation poses in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news. From climate change denialism to the frenzied conspiracy theories and racist mythologies that fuel antidemocratic white nationalist movements in the United States and abroad, What Would Cervantes Do? is a lucid meditation on the key role the humanities must play in dissecting and combatting all forms of disinformation. David Castillo and William Egginton travel back to the early modern period, the first age of inflationary media, in search of historically tested strategies to overcome disinformation and shed light on our post-truth market. Through a series of critical conversations between cultural icons of the twenty-first century and those of the Spanish Golden Age, What Would Cervantes Do? provides a tour-de-force commentary on current politics and popular culture. Offering a diverse range of Cervantist comparative readings of contemporary cultural texts –movies, television shows, and infotainment – alongside ideas and issues from literary and cultural texts of early modern Spain, Castillo and Egginton present a new way of unpacking the logic of contemporary media. What Would Cervantes Do? is an urgent and timely self-help manual for literary scholars and humanists of all stripes, and a powerful toolkit for reality literacy.

Approaches to Teaching Cervantes's Don Quixote

Approaches to Teaching Cervantes's Don Quixote
Author: James A. Parr
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 160329189X

This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Cervantes'sDon Quixote highlights dramatic changes in pedagogy and scholarship in the last thirty years: today, critics and teachers acknowledge that subject position, cultural identity, and political motivations afford multiple perspectives on the novel, and they examine both literary and sociohistorical contextualization with fresh eyes. Part 1, "Materials," contains information about editions of Don Quixote, a history and review of the English translations, and a survey of critical studies and Internet resources. In part 2, "Approaches," essays cover such topics as the Moors of Spain in Cervantes's time; using film and fine art to teach his novel; and how to incorporate psychoanalytic theory, satire, science and technology, gender, role-playing, and other topics and techniques in a range of twenty-first-century classroom settings.

Cervantes in Algiers

Cervantes in Algiers
Author: María Antonia Garcés
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2002
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780826514707

Returning to Spain after fighting in the Battle of Lepanto and other Mediterranean campaigns against the Turks, the soldier Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates and taken captive to Algiers. The five years he spent in the Algerian bagnios or prison-houses (1575-1580) made an indelible impression on his works. From the first plays and narratives written after his release to his posthumous novel, the story of Cervantes's traumatic experience continuously speaks through his writings. Cervantes in Algiers offers a comprehensive view of his life as a slave and, particularly, of the lingering effects this traumatic experience had on his literary production. No work has documented in such vivid and illuminating detail the socio-political world of sixteenth-century Algiers, Cervantes's life in the prison-house, his four escape attempts, and the conditions of his final ransom. Garces's portrait of a sophisticated multi-ethnic culture in Algiers, moreover, is likely to open up new discussions about early modern encounters between Christians and Muslims. By bringing together evidence from many different sources, historical and literary, Garces reconstructs the relations between Christians, Muslims, and renegades in a number of Cervantes's writings. The idea that survivors of captivity need to repeat their story in order to survive (an insight invoked from Coleridge to Primo Levi to Dori Laub) explains not only Cervantes's storytelling but also the book that theorizes it so compellingly. As a former captive herself (a hostage of Colombian guerrillas), the author reads and listens to Cervantes with another ear.

Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England

Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England
Author: Dale B. J. Randall
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 763
Release: 2009-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191561584

Cervantes in Seventeenth-century England garners well over a thousand English references to Cervantes and his works, thus providing the fullest and most intriguing early English picture ever made of the writings of Spain's greatest writer. Besides references to the nineteen books of Cervantes's prose available to seventeenth-century English readers (including four little-known abridgments), this new volume includes entries by such notable writers as Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, and John Locke, as well as many lesser-known and anonymous writers. A reader will find, among others, a counterfeiter, a midwife, an astrologer, a princess, a diarist, and a Harvard graduate. Altogether this broad range of writers, famed and forgotten alike, brings to light not only sectarian and political tensions of the day, but also glimpses of the arts-of weaving, singing, acting, engraving, and painting. Even dancing, for there was a dance called the "Sancho Panzo". The volume opens with a wide-ranging Introduction that among other things traces the English reception of both Cervantes's Don Quixote and his Novelas ejemplares, including the part they played in English drama. In the main body of the work, individual items are arranged chronologically by year and, within that framework, alphabetically by author, thus providing little-known seventeenth-century evidence regarding the nature and breadth of British interest in Cervantes in various decades. Thorough annotation helps readers to place individual entries in their historical, social, political, and in some instances religious contexts. The volume includes twenty-nine germane seventeenth-century pictures, an index of references to chapters in Don Quixote, and a full bibliography and index.

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Cervantes' Don Quixote
Author: Howard Mancing
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2006-04-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313081956

Recently voted the best literary work of all time, Cervantes' Don Quixote is widely read by students and has had enormous influence on popular culture. Written by a leading Cervantes scholar yet accessible to students and general readers, this book conveniently introduces Cervantes' masterpiece. Included along with a detailed plot summary are chapters on the novel's background, themes, style, and reception. The volume closes with an extensive bibliographical essay and a selected, general bibliography. In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club, affiliated with the Nobel Prize organization, polled 100 writers from around the world, asking each to name the 10 best works of imaginative literature of all time. Cervantes' Don Quixote, though first published in 1605, was the overwhelming winner. Don Quixote is a favorite among students and general readers alike. It has been translated into more languages than any book other than the bible; adapted to the stage more than any other non-dramatic text; illustrated more than any other novel; and inspired more films than any other literary work. Written by a leading scholar yet accessible to high school students, this guide is an indispensable introduction to the world's most important novel. An introductory chapter overviews Cervantes' life and career and discusses the background of his novel. The book then provides a detailed plot summary of Don Quixote and considers the merits of different editions. It then looks at the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the novel and gives extensive attention to the work's themes, style, and reception. A bibliographical essay and selected, general bibliography of major studies conclude the volume.

Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain

Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain
Author: Ana María G. Laguna
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501374931

Studies that connect the Spanish 17th and 20th centuries usually do so through a conservative lens, assuming that the blunt imperialism of the early modern age, endlessly glorified by Franco's dictatorship, was a constant in the Spanish imaginary. This book, by contrast, recuperates the thriving, humanistic vision of the Golden Age celebrated by Spanish progressive thinkers, writers, and artists in the decades prior to 1939 and the Francoist Regime. The hybrid, modern stance of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s would uniquely incorporate the literary and political legacies of the Spanish Renaissance into the ambitious design of a forward, democratic future. In exploring the complex understanding of the multifaceted event that is modernity, the life story and literary opus of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) acquires a new significance, given the weight of the author in the poetic and political endeavors of those Spanish left-wing reformists who believed they could shape a new Spanish society. By recovering their progressive dream, buried for almost a century, of incipient and full Spanish modernities, Ana María G. Laguna establishes a more balanced understanding of both the modern and early modern periods and casts doubt on the idea of a persistent conservatism in Golden Age literature and studies. This book ultimately serves as a vigorous defense of the canonical as well as the neglected critical traditions that promoted Cervantes's humanism in the 20th century.