Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Lloyd Hughes Davies
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture PDF Author: Lloyd Hughes Davies
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835762
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.

Latin American Women and the Literature of Madness

Latin American Women and the Literature of Madness PDF Author: Elvira Sánchez-Blake
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476621101
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques—a “poetics of madness”—employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.

Theatre Censorship in Spain, 19311985

Theatre Censorship in Spain, 19311985 PDF Author: Catherine O'Leary
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786839830
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
This is a comprehensive study of the impact of censorship on theatre in twentieth-century Spain. It draws on extensive archival evidence, vivid personal testimonies and in-depth analysis of legislation to document the different kinds of theatre censorship practised during the Second Republic (1931–6), the civil war (1936–9), the Franco dictatorship (1939–75) and the transition to democracy (1975–85). Changes in criteria, administrative structures and personnel from these periods are traced in relation to wider political, social and cultural developments, and the responses of playwrights, directors and companies are explored. With a focus on censorship, new light is cast on particular theatremakers and their work, the conditions in which all kinds of theatre were produced, the construction of genres and canons, as well as on broader cultural history and changing ideological climate – all of which are linked to reflections on the nature of censorship and the relationship between culture and the state.

Blood, Land and Power

Blood, Land and Power PDF Author: Manuel Perez-Garcia
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786837129
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The historical data and vast information in the historical sources is arranged in this book using software to make clusters of data and quantification. This serves as illustrative example for future research on how to apply such methods to historical research. The analysis of formation of new elites and powerful families, and the social networks they belonged to, serves to understand in the long run how groups and families in localities of southern Europe have consolidated their power and how political institutions (then and now) have served to the perpetuation of such families in the exercise of power. Disputes and rivalry between factions, elites and groups of power to control land (as main economic source of power) and political institutions have not ceased since the early modern period until today. Southern and Mediterranean Europe localities are a good example in which fierce struggles between elite groups have lasted across space and time.

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction PDF Author: Gustavo Carvajal
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This study is the only book in English to analyse Chilean memory culture using an interdisciplinary angle (memory studies, gender studies, literature in post-dictatorship Chile) It includes comprehensive material, from award-winning authors (Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Arturo Fontaine), rising stars of the Chilean literary scene (Nona Fernández) to first-time published novelists (Pía González, Fátima Sime) It is the only book in English that focuses on women, memory and dictatorship in contemporary Chile from a cultural and literary perspective. It offers a new way of comprehending Chilean memory culture, considering gender and literature as two key elements in this cultural approach to the recent past.

Reform, Rebellion and Party in Mexico, 18361861

Reform, Rebellion and Party in Mexico, 18361861 PDF Author: Brian Hamnett
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838524
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Between 1836 and 1861, Mexico’s difficulties as a sovereign state became fully exposed. Its example provides a case study for all similarly emerging independent states that have broken away from long-standing imperial systems. The leaders of the Republic in Mexico envisaged the construction of a nation, in a process that often conflicted with ethnic, religious, and local loyalties. The question of popular participation always remained outstanding, and this book examines regional and local movements as the other side of the coin to capital city issues and aspirations. Formerly an outstanding Spanish colony on the North American sub-continent, financial difficulties, economic recession, and political divisions made the new Republic vulnerable to spoliation. This began with the loss of Texas in 1836, the acquisition of the Far North by the United States in 1846–8, and the European debt-collecting Intervention in 1861. This study examines the Mexican responses to these setbacks, culminating in the Liberal Reform Movement from 1855 and the opposition to it.

Ophelia

Ophelia PDF Author: Sharon Keefe Ugalde
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835991
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has been woven into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts – from her first appearance in eighteenth-century translations of Hamlet, through depictions by seminal authors such as Espronceda, Bécquer and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what both male and female artists need her to be – is she invisible, a victim, mad, controlled by the masculine gaze, or is she an agent of her own identity? This well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia, whose poets, novelists and dramatists writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, as well as painters and photographers, have brought Shakespeare’s heroine to life in new guises. Ophelia performs as an authoritative female author, as new perspectives reflect and authorise the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.

Unhomely Rooms

Unhomely Rooms PDF Author: Roberto Ignacio Díaz
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838754894
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Even as he exposes the cultural fragmentation of Spanish America, Diaz's critical gesture allows strangeness to become an integral part not only of individuals, as Freud argues in "The Uncanny," but also of national cultural communities."--BOOK JACKET.

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America PDF Author: Jerónimo Arellano
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 161148670X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America rethinks the rise and fall of magical realism in Latin America in the light of the cultural history of the emotions, and in conversation with contemporary theories of the affects. It explores how twentieth-century magical realist narrative reimagines public and collective forms of feeling, in particular the colonial history of wonder in the wake of the voyages to the New World. Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America argues that this reconceptualization of magical realism also invites a new reading of its marked devaluation in contemporary Latin American literature, suggesting that this turning point responds to major changes in the uses and circulation of forms of emotional intensity in the present.

Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays

Spanish American Literature in the Age of Machines and Other Essays PDF Author: Ángel Rama
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438494494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Brings together and makes available in English for the first time some of Ángel Rama's most important essays.