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Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular. The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.
"This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and in their dyn...
Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. Volume 48 is a special issue that presents the outcome of an international workshop (“Transnational Aspects of Early Modern Drama”) held (virtually) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in June 2021. The conference was hosted by Jan Bloemendal, one of the most distinguished scholars in the field. This volume contains six transnational and/or translingual case studies of early modern theatre and four reviews which cover various epochs, genres and discourses.
Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period’s own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern historians would consider counterfactual: a culture where imaginative historical prose, poetry and drama self-consciously rivalled the accounts of royal chroniclers and the dispatches of diplomatic envoys; a culture dominated by a notion of truth in which skilful construction of the argument and exemplarity took precedence over factual accuracy. Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age:...
Why does the accent jump back and forth in Russian words like golová 'head', acc. gólovu, gen. golový, dat. golové etc.? How come we find similar alternations in other Slavic languages and in a Baltic language like Lithuanian? The quest for the origin of the so-called "mobile accent paradigms" of Baltic and Slavic leads the reader through other Indo-European language branches such as Indo-Iranian, Greek and Germanic, all of which are relevant to the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system. After the examination of the evidence for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European accentuation system, focus is moved to the Baltic and Slavic accentuation systems and their relationship to each other and to Proto-Indo-European. A comprehensive history of research and numerous bibliographical references to earlier pieces of scholarship throughout the book make it a useful tool for anybody who is interested in Balto-Slavic and Indo-European accentology. Written in a simple style and constantly aiming at presenting old and new opinions on the various problems, the volume may serve as an introduction to this complicated field.
"Con/Texts of Persuasion is a path-breaking multidisciplinary body of essays devoted to exploring how discourse--literary, but also political, religious, commercial and philosophical--draws on strategies from linguistics, pragmatics, argumentation theory, rhetoric and hermeneutics, not merely to communicate, but to induce recipients to think or to act differently than they might have otherwise. Persuasion is context- and culture-bound, a dialogue-friendly rhetoric in the hermeneutics of understanding (Gadamer) whose negation, manipulation, can serve the ends of propaganda ("Bend Sinister"); but it is also a vehicle for circumventing censure (burlesque) or for providing oratory with intertextual resonance ("I have a dream"). An appeal to emotions, values and subjectivity, persuasion can "immerse" the reader in a fictional world or it can result from the "phonosemantic" strategies of poetry and advertising. And the ways of persuasion can extend to the situatedness of interpretive context in critical discourse in its ideologically consonant vs. dissonant modes. An invaluable collection for anyone with an interest in the persuasive powers of textual communication."--Page 4 of cover.
Benjamin Szold (1829-1902) married Sophie Schaar (b. 1839) in 1859. They had five daughters, one of whom was the illustrious Henrietta (1860-1945).