Ramon del Valle-Inclan (1866-1936) was undoubtedly the most controversial literary figure of his generation. Whilst his genius was recognised by fellow writers, the reading public was slow to accept his work, and his theatre taxed directors and audiences alike. One of the harshest criticisms levelled against him concerned his use of repetition. This study shows how the reuse, recycling and development of material becomes one of the hallmarks of Valle-Inclan's writing during the first three decades of his literary career, linking one genre with another and blurring the borders between different aesthetics. The repetition of themes and motifs, characters and stylistic devices reveals an underlying interdependence among works that on the surface appear unconnected or even contradictory. Many of Valle-Inclan's works have been studied in isolation, rather than as pieces of a whole. This book examines the elements that provide significant links in his writing between 1889 and 1922, most of which shares the common backdrop of Galicia, and demonstrates that apparently unrelated works are part of a larger picture. Despite changes in perspective and genre, there are constants that relate individual works to those that precede and follow, creating a unifying pattern of continuity.

This volume, which takes its title from an international conference held at the University of Cambridge in November 2006, aims to shed new light on Schnitzler's oeuvre and his period by focusing on his as yet largely unpublished literary remains, his 'hidden manuscripts'. Among the key topics covered in this collection are: the reconstruction of the adventurous rescue of the manuscripts from Vienna in 1938 and a description of their current locations; an overview of the author's life, in its historical context, on the basis of such private documents as his diaries and letters; the plethora of existing variants, both published and unpublished, and their usefulness for our understanding of Schnitzler's work, from the Anatol cycle to the 'scandalous' Reigen - in the light of the discovery of its original manuscript - and Schnitzler's planned (but never completed) work on the historical figure of Emperor Joseph II; Schnitzler's difficult relationship with one of the most influential journalists of his time, Karl Kraus, and his literary friendship with a close but hitherto neglected contemporary, Gustav Schwarzkopf; the network of intertextual references 'hidden' in the revolutionary monologue novella Lieutenant Gustl against the background of Hermann Bahr's modernist theory of literature; and finally, Schnitzler's 'hidden legacy' in our own epoch. This book contains contributions in both English and German.

For the many poor and working-class Northeastern Brazilians who have been displaced from their home region for economic reasons, the music of forro is a redemptive attempt at establishing an immanent relationship to history and community in the diaspora. The redemption explored in this book is multifaceted, including a desire to return home as part of a larger workforce in a sustainable economy, the desire to see the region's rich culture celebrated throughout Brazil, and to ensure that its traditional legacies are both preserved and further enriched through respectful innovation. The acute perceptiveness of forro musicians in portraying the diasporic experience of Northeastern Brazilians is elaborated in various chapters, including: one chapter focused on lyrical, musical, and collective representations or manifestations of diasporic nostalgia (saudade), another chapter analyzing the lyrico-musical representation of rural workers' alienation from - and resistance to - life in the urban centers, and a third chapter which contextualizes forro's descriptions of the experiences of Brazil's internal migrants, utilizing an array of testimonials and academic studies on the subject of interregional migration to reveal both the wisdom of forro lyricists and some of their blind spots. The study also includes a historical analysis of this Northeastern genre's transformation from a rhythm called baiao that symbolically represented the Northeast as a simple, coherent entity, to forro, a more allegorical representation with a greater appreciation for the class, gender, racial, and generational complexity of the region. The development of the genre, as well as the circulation of theory related to cultural production and identity, are contextualized in a global economy.

Universally proclaimed as the most important Spanish playwright of the last half of the twentieth century, Antonio Buero Vallejo was deemed by a Madrid theater critic to be the greatest author of theater since Calderon de la Barca. This book explores ten of Buero's thirty plays, utilizing literary approaches ranging from the traditional to the radical. It breaks new ground by indicating how contemporary analyses can extrapolate vital interpretations in addition to what has been previously observed in Buero's theater. Simultaneously, the study metonymically evokes the depth and breadth of the plays not studied herein, suggesting they hold unexplored treasures for prospective explorers of the playwright's work.

Beautiful War explores the interdependent political, linguistic, and erotic registers of lesbian feminism in Monique Wittig's novels, querying in particular how they function collectively to destabilize male hegemony and heterosexism. Beginning with the assertion that Wittig expressly dismantles the Classical veneration of la belle femme in order to create an agent more capable of social change (la femme belliqueuse), the author traces the permutations of violence through her four novels, L'Opoponax, Les Guerilleres, Le Corps Lesbien, and Virgile, Non and examines the relevance of brutality to Wittig's feminist agenda. Drawing on literary criticism, intellectual and political history, queer theory, and feminist theory in his readings of the primary texts, the author argues that Wittig's oeuvre constitutes a progressive textual actualization of paradigm shifts toward gender parity and a permanent banishment of the primacy of male and heterosexist political and sexual discourse.

"Dew on the Grass": The Poetics of Inbetweenness in Chekhov is the first comprehensive and systematic study to focus on the poetic dimensions of Anton Chekhov's prose and drama. Using the concept of "inbetweenness", this book reconceptualizes the central aspects of Chekhov's style, from his use of language to the origins of his artistic worldview. Radislav Lapushin offers a fresh interpretive framework for the analysis of Chekhov's individual works and his oeuvre as a whole.

Since the 1980s, there has been an unprecedented and unremitting rise in the number of women writers in Galicia and Ireland. Publishers, critics, journals, and women's groups have played a decisive role in this phenomenon. Creation, Publishing, and Criticism provides a plurality of perspectives on the strategies deployed by the various cultural agents in the face of the advance of women authors and brings together a selection of articles by writers, publishers, critics, and theatre professionals who delve into their experiences during this process of cultural change. This collection of essays sets out to show how, departing from comparable circumstances, the Galician and the Irish literary systems explore their respective new paths in ways that are pertinent to each other. This book will be of particular interest to students of Galician and Irish studies, comparative literature, women's studies, and literary criticism. Both specialists in cultural analysis and the common reader will find this an enlightening book.

This is the first book-length study of the outstanding generation of Leningrad poets whose careers began during the Khrushchev Thaw. The text brings together memoirs, interviews, and archival research to construct an account of the world of poetry in Leningrad, in which many now-famous figures began writing. The author describes the institutions, official events, unofficial groups, and informal activities that were attended by many young poets, including the pre-eminent poet of this generation, Iosif Brodsky. Alongside a detailed study of Brodsky's work from the early 1970s are close readings of two other major poets from this generation whose work has often been overlooked, Viktor Sosnora and Dmitry Bobyshev.

Scholars of Italian colonialism have been reluctant to acknowledge the influence that local populations and their culture had on Italians and on the ways in which they settled and administered the territories they occupied. This tendency has reinforced the notion that the European domination of Africa was total both culturally and politically. Yet there is evidence to suggest that in every sphere of colonial life, the relationship between colonizers and colonized was more dynamic and complex than has been assumed. The essays in this interdisciplinary volume address the gap in Italian colonial/post-colonial studies by examining how different notions of 'hybridity' help illuminate the specific nature and circumstances of the Italian colonial and postcolonial condition. Some of the contributors see hybridity as a positive challenge to fixed categorizations. Others contend that its hasty deployment promotes a lack of attention to local difference. Foregrounding specific instances of cultural practice across a range of media from literature to oral testimony and the internet, this volume represents a new stage in the study of Italy's colonial past and its postcolonial afterlife.

This study explores a number of early modern comedias that deal with historical siege or military episodes in the history of the Iberian peoples. Cervantes's La Numancia, Lope de Vega's El asalto de Mastrique and his lesser known La nueva victoria de don Gonzalo de Cordoba, Calderon de la Barca's El sitio de Breda, and Velez de Guevara's El Hercules de Ocana are key texts examined here. Taking the distinction between history and fiction in Neo-Aristotelian literary theory as a point of departure, this book considers the intellectual and historical conditions that affect the ways in which early modern dramatists interpret historical events according to their own literary and ideological purposes. The interplay of history and fiction demonstrates uses and discontents of legitimizing fiction in the early modern period. Parallel themes of epic and siege intermingled with romance and carnivalesque humour, provide alternative perspectives to early modern representations of empire and war on the Spanish stage.

Ideal for students of modern Latin American literature, Journeys of Formation: The Spanish American 'Bildungsroman' offers a lucid introduction to the Bildungsroman as a genre before revealing how the journey motif works as both a plot-forming device and as a means of characterization in several of the most canonical Spanish American Bildungsromane. In the process, the author demonstrates the overlooked importance of the travel motif in this genre. Although present in the vast majority of Bildungsromane, if the journey is discussed at all by critics it tends to be in superficial terms. The author contends that no discussion of the Spanish American novel of formation would be complete without an exploration of travel. Yolanda A. Doub articulates the role of travel as a catalyst in the formation process of young male and female protagonists by examining in detail six representative novels from three different countries and time periods - from Argentina: Ricardo Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra (1926) and Roberto Arlt's El juguete rabioso (1926); from Peru: Jose Maria Arguedas's Los rios profundos (1958) and Julio Ramon Ribeyro's Cronica de San Gabriel (1960); and from Mexico: Rosario Castellanos's Balun Canan (1957) and Elena Poniatowska's La "Flor de Lis" (1988).

Is the affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony unbreakable? When intellectuals attempt to retell history from its bottom side, or when writers try to represent the so-called marginalized subject, are they not simply reinforcing the perspective and agenda of society's hegemonic currents? Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation engages in a discussion of the problem of this potentially unbreakable affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony. Through five twentieth-century Mexican literary works: Pedro Paramo (1955, Juan Rulfo); Hasta no verte Jesus mio (1969, Elena Poniatowska); three short stories from Ciudad Real (1960, Rosario Castellanos); Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992, Carmen Boullosa); and Muertos incomodos (falta lo que falta) (2005, Subcomandate Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II), this book attempts to examine the contradictory phenomenon that emerges when intellectuals' desire to represent a marginalized subject or history clashes with their own limited ability to fully know the marginalized. No critics have compiled these five seemingly unrelated Mexican texts in order to scrutinize such a contradictory tendency. Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation provides an innovative way to connect the five texts by delineating, within specific Mexican historical and geopolitical contexts, how and why intellectuals have difficulty moving away from the reproduction of "otherness", when they attempt to represent a marginalized subject or history. This book can be useful for those who are interested in the Spanish American boom literature, twentieth-century Mexican literature, women writing, testimonial writing, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, historical novels, and cultural studies.

The papers, the appreciation and the poem that are collected in this volume were delivered at the conference, Aesthetics and Politics in Modern German Culture, which was held from 31 August to 2 September 2008 at the University of Wales Conference Centre, Gregynog Hall, in honour of Professor Rhys W. Williams upon his retirement from the Chair of German at Swansea University. The contributions focus on broad themes in modern German culture, all of which reflect Rhys Williams' research interests: Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit; Representing/Resisting National Socialism; West German Writing; GDR Spaces and Voices; Exploring Masculinities in Fiction; Performing Politics, Performing Humour; Intertexts and Difference; and Lives and Letters.

Despite the numerous studies of the politics, economy, culture, and society of the Estado Novo, the relations established between publishers, authors, and governmental institutions and their contribution to the making of the literary canon are still marginal subjects of analysis. Based on the systems theories developed by Bourdieu, Dubois and Even-Zohar, this study focuses on the cultural production produced during the Estado Novo (1933-1974) and after the Revolution (1974-2004), within their political, economic and social framework. The chapters on Jose Saramago and Jose Luis Peixoto show them as examples of literary consecration that confirm the systemic relations in the Portuguese literary field. This research makes use of a survey on habits of purchase of Portuguese fiction, interviews with publishers, original statistical analyses, and takes a new approach to the study of Portuguese literature.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

This book is about the formation and development of Latin America as name, idea and concept, as well as the wider concepts of location, knowledge and the relationship between them. Latin America is not only a subject or an academic construct, it is also a perspective from which subjectivities are established, knowledge is developed and narratives are produced. This study argues that epistemology cannot exist in abstract terms, despite traditional academic arguments to the contrary. Therefore the author uses 'Latin America' to anchor his more general arguments in a particular location and calls this approach 'geo-epistemology'. The author discusses how the specificity of a particular location can contribute to the establishment of both a method of formulating human knowledge and the boundaries of what can be known. The text explores the relationship between philosophy, geography and geometry, and analyses the notions of science, empire and colonialism. In response to the contemporary debate on 'space of thinking', the author proposes a new concept of 'reversal thinking', which leads to an examination of the roles of language and writing from an epistemic point of view.

National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature: Chile and Argentina examines the traumatic experiences of Chile and Argentina under authoritarian regimes and argues that in order for postdictatorship countries to successfully implement transitions to democracy, they must confront the past. This book employs the research of psychologists Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, Donald Dutton, Elizabeth Loftus, and Cathy Caruth, in order to better understand the emotional and psychological effects of national trauma in the works of Chileans Diamela Eltit and Ariel Dorfman, and Argentines Ricardo Piglia and Griselda Gambaro. The themes and characters transcend national boundaries - the abuse, torture, paranoia, anguish, and shame are common to all human beings oppressed by tyranny. The inclusion of theater is necessary in global times for the art of drama has the power to ignite a repressed consciousness to emerge and contribute to progress and change. National Trauma in Postdictatorship Latin American Literature: Chile and Argentina proceeds with the reality that it is possible to heal from past trauma and become - once again - dignified citizens of the world.

Pedro Salinas (1892-1951), one of the greatest modern poets of any country, is unquestionably the preeminent love poet of twentieth-century Spain. Memory in My Hands includes an ample selection of his three books of love poetry - The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razon de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento] in English translation alongside the Spanish original. This trilogy of love poems, the last (posthumous) of which has never been translated before, are of a nature to win a large and devoted audience: they are at once passionate, eloquent, and whimsical. The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair that inspired the poems. It also raises the question of the nature of autobiographical poetry and considers this collection in the tradition of poetic sequences such as Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.

This collection of essays by thirteen renowned specialists in the fields of French Renaissance literature and history is a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Pauline Smith, Emeritus Professor in French at the University of Hull and Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Trinity College, Dublin. The essays, which focus on areas of research to which Professor Smith has herself given - and continues to give - particular attention, are organised into two frequently converging strands: court and humour. The contributors engage with political and cultural issues at the heart of the construction and aesthetic expression of the French Renaissance, whilst also offering insights into the broader European context. The collection as a whole challenges and revises a number of established views and identifies paths for future research.

La Romanistica, una disciplina sometida a un constante proceso de autorreflexion, manifiesta la vitalidad y la variedad de su investigacion linguistica a traves de los trabajos recogidos en este homenaje a Carmen Pensado. Un grupo de sus colegas y amigos repartidos por Europa y America le ofrecen el testimonio de su amistad y admiracion con ocasion de su jubilacion. En los articulos se tratan problemas que ilustran la amplitud tematica de la Romanistica y que coinciden en buena medida con los puntos centrales de la investigacion llevada a cabo por Carmen Pensado acerca de los motivos y el funcionamiento del cambio fonetico y los procesos de gramaticalizacion. La amplitud de los contactos intelectuales de la homenajeada se refleja en la presencia de trabajos de fonetica experimental, historia del lexico iberorromance, teoria de la morfologia, formacion de palabras de varias lenguas romances, teoria sintactica y cambio sintactico. Junto a articulos que discuten problemas del rumano, italiano, frances o gallego, predominan los dedicados al espanol o a las lenguas romanicas en su conjunto.

When one considers issues that are crucial to the evolution of French and Irish culture and behaviour, it is doubtful if there is anything more pertinent than globalisation and secularisation. Clearly, the experience of these concepts in both countries varies greatly: for example, while the French demonstrate a certain 'mefiance' - even 'mepris' - towards the globalistion project, which they associate with Hollywood, Microsoft, McDonalds and very little that is positive, the Irish, particularly during the Celtic Tiger years, were enthused by the possibilities it offered in terms of material gain and liberation from the excessive control of the Roman Catholic Church. In relation to the latter, many commentators argue that globalisation brought a more secular mindset to Ireland in recent decades, whereas in France the term 'laicite' is strongly identified with the Republican ideology that dates back to the French Revolution. Clearly, therefore, the theme is a revealing one. Cet ouvrage, qui contient des articles rediges en anglais et en francais, est compose des Actes du 4e Colloque franco-irlandais qui a eu lieu a l'universite Rennes 2 en mai 2008 sous l'egide du NCFIS.

This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov's works as operating between categories of various kinds - whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov's oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov's work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline.

This book examines Duras's contribution to contemporary cinema. The 'dark room' in the collection's title refers to one of Duras's metaphors for the writing process, la chambre noire, as the solitary space of literary creation, the place where she struggles to project her 'internal shadow' onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater and, by extension, for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the film's diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound, diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation. In doing so, they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen. This collection focuses on the aesthetic, conceptual, and political challenges involved in Duras's innovative approach to cinematic representation, from an interdisciplinar perspective including film and literary theory, psychoanalytic analysis, music theory, gender studies, and post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Duras's cinematic practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is divided into five parts, each one devoted to a specific aspect of Duras's films: the interaction between literature and cinema (Part One); the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze (Part Two) and of the image/sound relation (Part Three); the representation of history and memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).

This book offers a discussion of the trope of madness in twentieth-century French women's writing, focusing on close readings of the following texts: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie (1946), Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' (1967), Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975), Jeanne Hyvrard's Les Prunes de Cythere (1975) and Mere la mort (1976). The discussion traces the evolution in the way madness is taken up by women authors from the key period starting just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism and culminating at the height of the ecriture feminine project. This study argues that madness offers itself up to these authors as a powerful means to convey a certain ambivalence towards changing contemporary ideas on the authority of authorship. On the one hand a highly enabling means to figure transgression, the madwoman is equally the repository for a twentieth-century 'anxiety of authorship' on the part of the woman writer.

Historical and literary scholars have become increasingly interested in women's roles in and approaches to war. In times of conflict, French and francophone women have made crucial contributions in aid of the patrie, but wars have also set women against the governing powers, frequently forcing them to choose between their concerns as women, and the economic and social demands of their belligerent nations. This volume, the proceedings of the 9th UK Women in French conference entitled 'Les femmes et la guerre', brings together scholars from different academic disciplines - history, sociology, politics, literary criticism and gender studies - who explore the impact of war upon women in French and francophone societies. Les critiques litteraires et les historiens s'interessent de plus en plus aux roles des femmes pendant les periodes de guerre. Les femmes francaises et francophones ont, par leurs actions cruciales, aide la patrie en temps de guerre ; cependant, les conflits ont egalement oppose les femmes a leur gouvernement, en les obligeant souvent a choisir entre leurs interets en tant que femmes et les exigences economiques et sociales de leur pays belligerant. Ce volume, reproduisant les actes du 9e colloque britannique organise par " Women in French ", intitule " Les femmes et la guerre ", rassemble des specialistes de diverses disciplines - histoire, sociologie, sciences politiques, critique litteraire et etudes de genre - pour analyser les effets de la guerre sur les femmes en France et dans les pays francophones.