Böcker i Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures-serien

Explores how Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) imagines and engenders the Spanish nation in her theatrical production staged and/or published between 1898 and 1909. In the aftermath of Spain's colonial losses, Pardo Bazan generated a series of theatrical proposals to revitalize the nation.

Examines the practice of philanthropy in modern Spain. Through detailed studies of popular music, collective readings, dramas, working-class manuals, and fiction, Vialette reveals how depictions of urban philanthropic activities can inform our understanding of interactions in the economic, cultural, religious,and educational spheres, class power dynamics, and gender roles in urban Spanish society.

The analysis of the three authors' proverbs through comparisons with classical, medieval, and early modern collections of maxims and sententiae provides insights on the fluidity of such expressions, and illustrates the tight relationship between proverbs and sociocultural factors.

Argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

On Emerging from Hyper-Nation represents Ronald W. Sousa's attempt to answer the question, "e;Why do I smile on reading one of Saramago's 'historical' novels?"e; Why that reaction of emotional release? To answer the "e;smile question"e; the book engages in a critical mode that could be described as "e;discourse analysis."e; It combines several critical strains and relies on basic concepts from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and contemporary cognitive psychology for their discourse-analytical value rather than as entrees into psychoanalytical reading per se. The introductory chapter presents some of the concepts that underlie that compound analytical modality and sets out an overview of twentieth-century Portuguese social and economic history. Then, with an eye to answering the "e;smile question,"e; the book reads Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's three novels, Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). Or, better, it seeks to read Sousa's own reading of the three works, since focus falls on how each novel seeks to construct both its own reading and also Sousa as its reader. The discussion brings to light a number of textual phenomena that bear upon the "e;smile question."e; Among them are that the novels invoke, often subtly, the fascist hermeneutical heritage remaining from before the revolution of 1974 as a constituent part of their communication with the reader; that they summon up historical trauma; that they function as Freudian-style "e;tendentious jokes"e;; and that, through these various invocations, they seek to constitute a postrevolutionary Portuguese subject. The reading of Sousa's reading, then, ends up being a reading of some of the cultural forces at work in postrevolutionary Portugal.