by Jesús M. Usunáriz, Edwin Williamson (eds (2013)
"Este libro examina las opiniones -críticas feroces y grotescas o alabanzas cortesanas- sobre la figura de los validos y favoritos; se analiza el profundo impacto que suscitaron las tesis de Maquiavelo en las obras de poetas y tratadistas. Calderón, Cervantes, Quevedo, Alemán, Lope de Vega, Guevara, Gracián, Ribadeneyra y un gran número de autores (teólogos, historiadores, arbitristas...) aparecen en estas páginas como hombres que conocían y participaban de los retos políticos y sociales de su época."--P. [4] of cover.
Joan FitzPatrick Dean
Drawing upon unpublished material from the Friel archive at the National Library of Ireland, Joan FitzPatrick Dean contrasts the expressly theatrical elements of Friel's play and their cinematic counterparts.
Janet Galligani Casey
"The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional "'American modernism" syllabi and research agendas." "The selected essays take up, among others, such "hard-core" leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless "lost" novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath." "This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and students of American cultural studies."--BOOK JACKET.
Jacques Pelletier
Production littéraire québécoise (oeuvres romanesques) et question nationale. Trois essais consacrés respectivement à Jacques Godbout, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu et André Major. Les analyses et les interprétations de l'auteur se situent dans la tradition marxienne de Lukacs et Goldmann. Les textes réunis ont été ébauchés au tournant des années 1980. Selon R. Saletti, l'oeuvre "n'échappe pas aux contraintes d'une vision déterministe de l'Histoire".
John M. Grammer
In a group of five biographical and critical sketches that cover the period from 1810 to 1861, John M. Grammer explores the process by which "the South" was created as a concept in American culture. Three of the five Virginians Grammer examines were politicians with a literary bent - John Taylor, John Randolph, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The other two, George Fitzhugh and Joseph Glover Baldwin, were fiction writers fascinated with politics. United in their desire to represent the South as a refuge of pastoral and republican order in an America where, as Emerson observed, "the ancient manners were giving way," all of these men aspired to speak for their region; and all of them, sooner or later, found that they had to begin by reinventing it. Grammer relates the debate over southern identity not only to the wish to defend slavery or agrarian life but to the larger search for order in the aftermath of an age of revolution. He also connects it to the long-standing American concern, born of the ideology of republicanism, over the mortality of American society. Southerners' search for a stable identity and their at times fierce defense of slavery were, according to Grammer, a response to what J. G. A. Pocock has called "the Machiavellian moment" in republican cultures - the moment when the republic is made to recognize its finitude in time. He maintains that we can best understand our antebellum southern writers by thinking of them not as the unwitting ancestors of Faulkner, but as the fully self-conscious contemporaries of Emerson and Whitman, the heirs of Jefferson and Hamilton - as citizens of a young republic facing what looked more and more like its imminent demise. With increasing mechanization and westward expansion transforming their formerly stable world, all antebellum Americans lived in a Machiavellian moment, and as Grammer deftly demonstrates, the long effort to mold the South into a symbol of order, like Whitman's search for a suitably symbolic America, must be understood in relation to that condition. A major, innovative contribution to the fields of both southern history and southern literary criticism, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South is a valuable volume for all students of the South.