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Books : Literature & Fiction : Classics : Spanish & Portuguese
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This anthology, described by Dickens himself as "a whimsical sort of masque intended to awaken loving and forebearing thoughts" contains his Prefaces, "A Christmas Carol", "The Chimes", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "The Battle of Life" and "The Haunted Man". This is a study edition.
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Hailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs recounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmer’s part in the rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuela’s masterpiece is a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment.
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"""One of the essential experiences, the greatest perhaps, is Cervantes...Alas! If only we knew with certainty the secret of Cervantes' style, of his manner of approaching things, we would have found out everything.""In "Meditations on Quixote", Jos Ortega y Gasset presents a powerful case for integrating literature into experience. Through a series of ""essays in intellectual love,"" Ortega explores the aim of philosophy: to carry a given fact (a person, a book, a landscape, an error, a sorrow) by the shortest route to its fullest significance. He then considers how literature, specifically Cervantes, contributes to realizing this aim. Arguing that ""we are all heroes in some measure,"" that ""heroism lies dormant everywhere as a possibility,"" and that ""the will to be oneself is heroism,"" Ortega urges us to integrate the possible into our conception of the real. He presents "Quixote" as a profound book, full of references and allusions to the universal meaning of life, a book that presents with maximum intensity the particular mode of human existence that is peculiarly Spanish. A call to his fellow Spaniards to join him in forging a new Spain, Ortega's "Meditations on Quixote" is also an invitation to his fellow humans to take up the challenge of literature, opening our minds and seeking all-embracing connections with the world and its people."
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José Tomas de Cuéllar (1830-1894) was a Mexican writer noted for his sharp sense of humor and gift for caricature. Having a Ball and Christmas Eve are two novellas written in the costumbrista style, made popular in the mid-nineteenth century by the periodical press in which these sketches of contemporary manners were first published. The stories are a sensitive reflection of the effects of modernization brought by an authoritarian regime dedicated to order and progress.
Having a Ball depicts women and their dedication to fashion. It is through them that Cuellar examines a society susceptible to foreign values, the importation of which radically altered the face of Mexico and its traditional customs. Christmas Eve describes a volatile middle class in which people pursue pleasure and entertainment without regard to morality.
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"This translation of Xicotencatl makes available to English-speaking readers a key text in the nineteenth-century history of Spanish American literature. . . . I am delighted that someone has seen fit to rescue this marvelous story of good and evil, with its [still] pertinent discussion of political and personal morality." --Nancy Vogeley, Professor of Spanish, University of San Francisco As Spain's New World colonies fought for their independence in the early nineteenth century, an anonymous author looked back on the earlier struggle of native Americans against the Spanish conquistadores and penned this novel, Xicotencatl. Writing from a decidedly anti-Spanish perspective, the author describes the historical events that led to the march on Tenochtitlan and eventual conquest of the Aztec empire in 1519 by Hernan Cortes and his Indian allies, the Tlaxcalans. Xicotencatl stands out as a beautiful exposition of an idealized New World about to undergo the tremendous changes wrought by the Spanish Conquest. It was published in Philadelphia in 1826. In his introduction to this first English translation, Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliu discusses why the novel was published outside Latin America, its probable author, and his attitudes toward his Spanish and Indian characters, his debt to Spanish literature and culture, and the parallels that he draws between past and present struggles against Spanis
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The modem Brazilian short story begins with the mature work of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), acclaimed almost unanimously as Brazil's greatest writer. Collectively, these nineteen stories are representative of Machado's unique style and world view, and this translation doubles the number of his stories previously available in English.
The stories in this volume reflect Machado's post-1880 emphasis on social satire and experimentation in psychological realism. If he had continued to produce the moralistic love stories and parlor intrigues of his earlier fiction, Machado's legacy would have been an entertaining but inconsequent body of work. However, by 1880 he had begun a devastating satirical assault on society through his fiction. In spite of his ruthlessness, Machado does at times reveal an ironic sympathy for his characters. He is not indifferent to human conflict but uses humor and irony to stress the absurdity of these conflicts, acted out against the backdrop of an indifferent universe. Such a spectacle creates a sense of helplessness that can only inspire wistful amusement.
In his technical mastery of the short story. Machado was decades ahead of his contemporaries and can still be considered more modern than most of the modernists themselves. That his stories elicit such strong and diverse reactions today is a tribute to their richness,
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"Appearing for the first time in English, these stories express the anguish and courage of women from their different classes and regions as they recognize their common restlessness and forge a new consciousness."Â —Booklist
"... provocative... Although not all the pieces are outwardly political, there is a political edge to the book; the tone of the stories is bleak as they tell of Brazilian women's struggles with government, society, men and their own private demons. Sadlier's able translations retain a distinctive voice and style for each writer." —Publishers Weekly
"Sadlier... has done a service to students of Comparative Literature and Women's Studies as well as to general readers who sincerely want to know what literature of quality Âis being written in that all-too-rarely studied Portuguese language of Brazil."Â —Revista de Estudios Hispanicos
"The pieces... convey... the evolution in the consciousness of the writers, their sense of themselves, and their place in society as well as the changes affecting Brazil's political climate and society at large during this century."Â —Review of Contemporary Fiction
"A superb addition to the increasing number of anthologies dedicated to Brazilian literature." —Choice
"A must for any modern literary collection." —WLW Journal
Women writers have revolutionized Brazilian literature, and this impressive collection will provide English readers with a window on this revolution. These twenty previously untranslated selections by some of Brazil's most important writers illustrate the remarkable power of women's voices and the important contributions they have made to twentieth-century literature.
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criticism
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Is Nazarin a latter-day Christ or a Quixotic fool? Saintly, mysterious, irritating, he attampts to set up an alternative society based on non-resistance to evil and the rejection of private property--often with hilarious results.
A strikingly modern work, it is at once a serious discussion of the roots of Christianity, an exploration of abnormal psychology, a critique of bourgeois materialism, and a brilliant exercise in comedy. This new translation does full justice to the richness and rhythm of Galdos's style, and makes available for the first time in English this important late work of Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist.
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One of the most dramatic figures among Latin America's romantic writers and the distinguished woman writer of her century, Juana Manuela Gorriti brings passion and intrigue to the scene of writing. An exile from her native Argentina who sought refuge first in Bolivia and then in Peru, her lifetime of travel and displacement is echoed in her fictions. Her short stories tell of homelessness and nomadic yearnings, taking the reader from the Peruvian highlands, where Spanish colonizers plot to rob the treasures of the Incas, to the Argentine capital city plagued by sinister political intentions. Her later fictions move from Chile to scenes of the California Gold Rush.
Covering the wide landscape of the Americas, Gorriti tracks the spirit of nineteenth-century adventurers and dandies, nation builders and soldiers who participate in the conflicts of settlement in a new and lawless land. Women are the protagonists here, mediating episodes of civil strife as they voice their despair about the treachery of fortune seekers in Latin America in the years following Independence from Spain.
Dreams and Realities offers a sampling of Gorriti's stories, showing the range of her commitment to political fiction drawn in the romantic style. Originally published in four volumes under the titles Suenos y realidades and Panoramas de la vida, her works deal with the ty
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This is a Spanish regional novel, which centres on the decaying, ancient mansions of Galicia, in which the occupants are enmeshed in greed, lust and violence.
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In this novel based on the author's own experience, wealthy Leo Del Río is kidnapped from her car on a Mexico City street. She is blindfolded and held hostage by unknown and unseen captors. As the days pass, Leo applies all of her powers of observation and intuition to a study of the men who guard her. As they bring her meals, light her cigarettes, and lead her from room to room, she relies on conversation, both to learn more about them and to attempt to make them see her as a person. She searches for clues to the gang's motivation and tries to plan her actions in the case of rescue or, her deepest fear as the days go by, abandonment and death. The breathtaking conclusion is both unexpected and completely believable.Set against the backdrop of contemporary Mexico, this absorbing novel is a penetrating psychological study of the effects of terroristic crime. Readers will be moved by its heroine's vulnerability, self-deprecating humor, and deep compassion.
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Women, Guerrillas, and Love was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
How can literature show us what went awry in the process of liberation, and in the construction of a different, better world? Ileana Rodriguez pursues this question through a reading of "politically committed" literature—texts produced within the context of Latin American guerrilla movements. Che Guevara's diary, testimonios by Omar Cabezas and Tomás Borge, novels and short stories by Sergio Ramírez and Arturo Arias: These are among the works Rodriguez examines.
Rodriguez seeks to pinpoint the relationship between the collective and woman, and between woman and the nation-state. Women, Guerrillas, and Love challenges current assumptions about the relationship of gender and sexuality to writing and state building during revolutionary moments. Employing several theoretical paradigms—Marxism, feminism, deconstruction—these readings take into account the "implosion" of socialist or socialist-like societies responding to the expansion of positivistic cultures. The book participates in the debate over the subjugation of insolvent nationstates to the mandates of the market, and the consequent substitution of economic master narratives for historical ones.
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El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos builds on recent work in discourse analysis and the critique of representation that is developing in such fields as anthropology, history, and cultural geography. Engaging with a wide variety of texts, such as Colón's Diario, Vespucio's Lettera, Sigüenza y Góngora's Alboroto y motÃÂn, Cervantes de Salazar's México en 1554, Balbuena's Grandeza mexicana, and Clavijero's Historia antigua de México, it traces the origins and uses of geopolitical knowledge from classical times to eighteenth-century colonial Mexico, and provides new perspectives on ethnicity, gender, European subjectivity, and the construction of colonial geographies. Looking at the movement of ideas across borders and over time, this study identifies the European perception of the American body as an abject body, one that destabilizes system, identity, and order. It explores the relationship of body and space as a continuum of colonial discursive practices and strategic representations, focusing on the construction of identity, and the definitions of physical and cultural frontiers. This book goes beyond previous readings of the texts by suggesting new directions for the analysis and interpretation of spatiality, corporeality and agency in colonial Spanish America.
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A selection from a literary genre little known outside its geographical area is here translated into English, providing information about the work of some writers in this field, and extending modern Galician literature beyond the confines of the Spanish State. It forms part of a growing awareness among Hispanists and Luso-Brazilian scholars of the other Iberian languages with their corresponding cultures: Galician, Catalan and Basque. With the emerging of these three national autonomies, the nature of the "Spanish" canon has been undergoing revision, and should continue to do so.