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Criticism of La Regenta has until recently focused on the text's plot as an extraordinarily coherent and convincing fictional world. Stephanie A. Sieburth demonstrates that the devices which produce order in the text are counterbalanced by an equally strong tendency toward entropy of meaning. The narrator is shown to be duplicitous and unreliable in his judgments on characters and events. Without an omniscient narrator, readers must interpret for themselves the complex intertextual structure of the novel. Saints' lives, honor plays, and serial novels each provide partial reflections of Ana Ozores' story. The text becomes a collage of mutually reflecting segments which, like Ana in her moments of self-doubt and madness, ultimately question the function of language and of any overriding interpretation or meaning.
Married to the retired magistrate of Vetusta, Ana Ozores cares deeply for her much older husband but feels stifled by the monotony of her life in the shabby and conservative provincial town. And when she embarks on a quest for fulfillment through religion and even adultery, a bitter struggle begins between a powerful priest and a would-be Don Juan for the passionate young woman's body and soul. Scandalizing contemporary Spain when it was first published in 1885, with its searing critique of the Church and its frank treatment of sex, La Regenta is a compelling and witty depiction of the complacent and frivolous world of upper-class society.
"This study demonstrates the previously unrecognised significance of discourses of saintliness for constructions of gender and national identity in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Spanish culture.a Kathy Bacons innovative approach to sainthood leads to fresh readings of texts by Spains three principal realist novelists: La familia de Leon Roch and Nazarin (Benito Perez Galdos, 1878 and 1895), La Regenta (Leopoldo Alas, 1884-85), and Dulce dueno (Emilia Pardo Bazan, 1911).a The author challenges the conventional distinction between anti-clerical and spiritual novels by these writers, and questions previous feminist assumptions about the negative role of religion for female identity.aSainthood emerges as a key theme through which texts grapple with Spains difficult transition to modernity."
The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.
In Don Juan and the Point of Honor, James Mandrell undertakes a systematic examination of the many questions surrounding the legendary character. What emerges is a view of Don Juan as a positive social force in patriarchal society and culture. Mandrell shows that Don Juan should not be treated as an innocent or outmoded cultural artifact.
Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
Writing Teresa: The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jesús “boom” of roughly 1880–1930, and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period’s interest in the Saint from Ávila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.
This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdos's first series of Episodios Nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)'s La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixotism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.
In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer played a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood as a critical analytic tool that not only sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.
Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self-realization.