LITMIR.BIZ

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.

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This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures. They were written at different points in time and even though they have been corrected and adapted, they have kept the tension and fervour with which they were originally created. They provide the reader with a vision of what goes on behind those horrifying images that depict Mexico as a country plagued by narcotrafficking groups and subjected to unbridled homicidal violence. These images hide the complex political reality of the country and the accidents and shocks democracy has suffered.

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This is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century national drama in contemporary Spain, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies. The book contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country’s three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

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This is the first book-length English-language study of a group of five artists closely linked with the Spanish avant-garde in the 1920s and 1930s, now known as the ‘Other’ Generation of 27. In the same way that their contemporaries of the celebrated Generation of 27 (which included Federico Garcia Lorca) attempted a revolution of the arts through poetry inspired by European modernism, the ‘Other’ Generation of 27 attempted to renovate Spanish humour, first in prose, and then in the theatre and cinema. This book demonstrates how these humorists drew on the humour of Chaplin, Keaton, Lubitsch and the Marx Brothers for their stage comedy, and how they stretched the limits of the stage at the time by incorporating cinematic techniques, such as flashback, voice-overs and montage, in their search for new dramatic forms.

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This fully illustrated, edited volume brings together fresh insights into the changing urban space of Barcelona from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. The volume will contribute to the excavation of the avantgarde in Barcelona, as well as its legacy in the post-war period, although its primary focus will be on the relationship between environment, identity and performance as explored by countercultural artists and communities from the 1960s to the present day.

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Galicia, a non-state nation in north-west Spain, has often been portrayed as a sentimental nation, a misty land of poets and legends. This book offers the first study of this trope as a feminizing, colonial stereotype that has marked Galician cultural history since the late nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the main texts of Galician literary history, the author shows how this trope has helped sustain the unequal power relation between Galicia and the Spanish State. As a consequence, questions of masculinity, morality and respectability have played an essential role in Galicia's national construction, thereby enforcing a masculine definition and limiting the role of women. This book argues for a revision of the main texts of Galician cultural nationalism through a gender and postcolonial perspective, showing that contemporary portrayals of Galician history are dependent on the politically debilitating trope of Galician sentimentality.

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