This 1991 book describes the history of peasants in Catalonia, the wealthiest and politically dominant part of the medieval Kingdom of Aragon, between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. It focuses on the period from 1000 to 1300, when free peasants who had held property under favourable frontier conditions were progressively subjugated by their lords. Between 1462 and 1486 Catalan peasants mounted the most successful peasants' war of the Middle Ages, and achieved the formal abolition of servitude. Professor Freedman seeks to explain both the process by which servitude was strengthened over the centuries, and its eventual weakening before a direct moral and military challenge. He addresses both the causes of enserfment and the limitations on its effectiveness. The book integrates archival evidence with the theories of society elaborated by medieval jurists. Comparisons are drawn between Catalonia and other regions, and its experience is situated within a spectrum of different social and economic conditions.

The late fifteenth-century Spanish masterpiece Celestina is one of the world's classics. In this important study, Dorothy Sherman Severin investigates how Fernando de Rojas' work in dialogue, which parodies earlier genres, is a precursor of the modern novel. In Celestina, the hero Calisto parodies the courtly lover, the heroine Melibea lives through classical examples and popular students' knowledge, the bawd and go-between Celestina deals a blow to the world of wisdom literature, and Melibea's father Pleberio gives his own gloss on the lament. There is also a fatal clash between two literary worlds, that one of the self-styled courtly lover (the fool) and the prototype picaresque world of the Spanish Bawd and her mentors (the rogues). The voices of Celestina are parodic, satiric, ironic and occasionally tragic, and it is in their discourse that the dialogue world of the modern novel is born. In order to make this book accessible to a wider English-speaking readership, quotations from the text are accompanied by English translations, mainly from the seventeenth-century English version by James Mabbe.

This book provides a general survey of the life and work of the Spanish philosopher and essayist Ortega y Gasset (1183–1955), author of the widely read The Revolt of the Masses. Dr Dobson divides his study into sections devoted to Ortega's political thinking and to his philosophy, rooting these in the context of contemporary Spain and discussing the wider implications of their influence. He examines Ortega's position with regard to the Civil War, his ambivalent espousal of socialism, his emphasis on the importance of the select individual in the modernisation of society and creation of a nació vital; the appropriation of his ideas by Primo de Rivera in the cause of fascism. This book is intended to be accessible to both Hispanists and general readers with an interest in literature, history, intellectual and political thought and philosophy.

Fray Luis de León (1527–91) is known chiefly as the author of some of the finest poetry of the Spanish Golden Age, but he also wrote important prose works in both Latin and Spanish, and produced eloquent translations into Spanish of biblical and classical texts. He spent five years imprisoned in solitary confinement by the Spanish Inquisition, fighting to clear himself of a series of accusations against his views on the Bible. Acquitted on all counts, he returned to teach at the University of Salamanca. This book examines the controversies in which Fray Luis was caught up, and investigates the complex influences upon his writings of his prison experiences, his indebtedness to Judaism, his interests as a linguist, and his work as a biblical scholar and theologian. Colin Thompson looks afresh at Fray Luis's most famous poems and prose works, and explores his understanding of language as a means of enabling God to speak to humanity and humanity to rise to God.

The Comentarios reales de los incas, a classic of Spanish Renaissance prose narrative, was written by Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish conquistador. It is full of ideological tensions and apparent contradictions as Garcilaso attempts to reconcile a pagan new-world culture with the fervent Christian evangelism of the period of the discovery and conquest of America. This study of the Comentarios is original both in adopting the perspective of discourse analysis and in its interdisciplinary approach. Margarita Zamora examines the rhetorical complexities of the Comentarios, and shows how, in order to present Inca civilization to Europeans, Garcilaso turned to disciplines other than traditional historiography, and in particular to the linguistic strategies of humanist philology and hermeneutics. Professor Zamora reveals how Garcilaso's views of the Incas were shaped by the dual nature of his background, by his commitment to humanism and Christianity, by the expectations he had of his readers, and by the discursive practices of his time.

The Frenchman Juan de Grimaldi was instrumental in the development of the Spanish theatre in the 1820s and 30s, at a time when censorship, repression, and economic chaos had left it in a state of stagnation. As impresario and stage director, he trained actors in the new style of declamation, made physical changes in sets and lighting, translated recent French plays into Spanish, and encouraged the writing of original Spanish plays. His own magical comedy, La Pata de Cabra (1829), was outstandingly successful. Grimaldi was also a wealthy businessman and newspaper editor, and the patron of many important Spanish Romantic writers. He was active in politics, vigorously defending the moderate policies of the Queen Regent, María Cristina, and of Prime Minister Ramón de Nerváez. Even after his return to Paris, Grimaldi continued to work secretly as an agent of the Spanish government. Based on original archival materials, this is the first in-depth study of Grimaldi's involvement in the literary and political progress of nineteenth-century Spain.

The corregidores were Castilian royal officials who functioned as mayors and superior judges in the provinces, cities, towns, and villages they were sent to oversee. At the head of urban militias they took part in the War of Succession and the Granada War. The corregidores thus had significant dealings with the peasantry, urban masses, the merchants, the nobles, the aristocracy, the officials of the Inquisition. Through its study of their many varied duties, this book offers a panoramic view of Castile during the late medieval and Renaissance eras. Despite their importance, a major study has never before been devoted entirely to their activities during the reign. This study also incorporates a major effort at periodisation of Isabella's reign, the first attempted in modern times. Overall, the book offers a tripartite dissection of the queen's career in power and an assessment of the differing states of the operations of corregidores over her three decades.

This volume of essays constitutes a critical reappraisal of a front-rank world author, Gabriel García Márquez, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Apart from extending critical appreciation of his work to an English-reading public, its principal objective is to reflect the breadth and variety of critical approaches to literature applied to a single corpus of writing; here, the major novels (including Love in the Times of Cholera, 1986) and a selection of his short fiction are considered. The aim of this collection, given these dual objectives, is to extend knowledge of the work of García Márquez and introduce to both the general reader and to students of literature a plurality of current critical approaches to his rich variety of fictional techniques. The volume also includes a bibliography of criticism available in English and an English translation of the author's Stockholm Nobel acceptance address.

This book tells the story of Sur, Argentina's foremost literary and cultural journal of the twentieth century. Victoria Ocampo (its founder and lifelong editor) and Jorge Luis Borges (a regular and influential contributor) feature prominently in the story, while the contributions of other major writers (including Eduardo Mallea, William Faulkner, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz, Waldo Frank, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene) are discussed. Politically speaking, Sur represented a certain brand of liberalism, a resistance to populism and mass culture, and an attachment to elitist values which offended against the more dominant phases of Argentine thought, from Peronism to the varied forms of nationalism, socialism and Marxism. Dr King examines the journal's roots, its development and its demise, relating it to other journals circulating at the time, and highlighting vital issues debated in its pages, such as Argentine attitudes towards fascism during the Second World War.

In the Spanish Golden Age, the new literary mode of vernacular prose fiction was deplored by many authorities for setting bad examples, undermining reality by deceiving with lies, and persuading in the face of rational disbelief. Dr Ife here examines the connection between the objections posed to this fiction and those raised two thousand years earlier by Plato. This book shows how the aims and results of 'picaresque' novel writing in fact counter such objections. In a study of three sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish novels Dr Ife demonstrates that the authors consciously exploited their readers' response to a narrative in order to bring them to a clearer understanding of their own experience. In this way the very process of representation deplored by the Platonist critics may be regarded as having a moral validity of its own. Additional English translations are provided of all the key extracts studied.

This is the first thorough study of Calderón in comparison with other important dramatists of the period: Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina in Spain, Racine and Corneille in France, and Shakespeare and Marlowe in England. Cascardi studies Calderón's paradoxical engagement with illusion in its philosophical guise as scepticism. He shows on the one hand Calderón's moral will to reject illusion and on the other his theatrical need to embrace it. Cascardi discusses plays from every period to show how in Calderón's best work illusion is not rejected; instead, scepticism is absorbed. Calderón is placed in and defined against the philosophical line of Vives, Descartes, and Spinoza. Of central importance to this argument is Calderón's idea of theatre and the various transformations of that idea. This emphasis will give the book an additional interest to students, readers in philosophy and comparative literature.

In this book Linda Martz explores the major developments in the theory and practice of poor relief in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and determines how far Spanish attitudes to poverty compared with those of other countries in western Europe. This scholarly and lucid exploration of attitudes to poverty and welfare has been prepared with the interests of non-Hispanists also borne in mind and all quotations are in English. It provides an original contribution to the socio-economic history of western Europe.

Francisco de Quevedo was known throughout seventeenth-century Europe as the author of two Spanish best-sellers, the picaresque novel El buscón, and the satirical Sueños. Thoroughly Baroque in style, the poems share many traits with the metaphysical poetry of Quevedo's English contemporaries. His poetry has been a major influence on modern Spanish and Latin American poets. This study of the poetry combines a stylistic analysis with a philosophical interpretation in the broad sense. It is thus an aesthetic and existential study and concentrates on the love sonnets of 'High Style'. The poet confronts the courtly tradition with experience, taking a stand against its ethical restrictions. By means of irony and conceptismo, the wit displayed in his poetic conceits, Quevedo attempts to solve the conflict between ideal love and sensual passion. Professor Olivares also shows that the thoughts and emotions evoked by the experience of love are inseparable from Quevedo's anguished world vision.

Benito Pérez Galdós was the foremost Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century. His novels are frequently compared with those of Dickens and Balzac, and considered examples of nineteenth-century realism. In a speech before the Spanish Academy of Language, Galdós himself declared that the novel is 'an image of life'; scholars have often considered that image to be an uncritical reflection, or even a biased misrepresentation of the Spanish society of the time. This book shows, by detailed analysis of Galdós narrative techniques, how his novels display a much more skeptical and ironical attitude toward the ability of language to represent reality, than has previously been recognized. Rather than attempting to judge the accuracy of Galdós' image of life the author analyzes the linguistic means by which the novels recreate life in their own image. With close and discriminating attention to detail the author illustrates Galdós' narrative irony with examples from the serie contemporénea, the most highly acclaimed period of his writing. She analyzes the ironic possibilities under three main headings: depiction of characters, description of places, and the narrative voice. A final chapter describes the fusion of these devices in the novella Torquemada en la hoguera. This clearly argued study, structuralist in approach and sensitive to nuances of style and language, will appeal to students of modern critical theory and comparative literature as well as to Hispanists.