Aurora Bertrana


Book Description

Silvia Roig explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the 20th century. Aurora Bertrana's works are almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Her rich, intellectual work has not received the attention it deserves, relegated almost to absolute oblivion. The author reviews and studies twenty-four of Bertrana's novels written in Catalan andSpanish, including: Ariatea (1960), El pomell de les violes (MS), L'inefable Philip (MS), La aldea sin hombres (mn.), La madrecita de los cerdos (MS), Entre dos silencis (1958), La ninfa d'argila (1959), Fracàs (1966) and La ciutat dels joves: reportatge fantasia (1971). She studies her work, published and unpublished, from a feminist approach, taking into account the intellectual history of Spain and Catalonia. Bertana's strong commitment to social issues reveals her association with the Modernist and Noucentists trends of her time. Bertrana's novels reveal a unique interest in non-Western cultures and lifestyles and her work undertakes controversial topics and socio-cultural issues, while she observes and draws special attention to the situation of women in different circumstances and cultural geographies. This book is therefore anchored on interpretive and theoretical parameters that intersect with consideration of gender, such as travel-and-gender and war-and-gender. Roig uses the work of feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Jelke Boesten, Margaret and Patrice Higonnet, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Julia Kristeva to help assess Bertrana's engagement with gender and socio-political issues. This approach is particularly well suited for a writer like Bertrana, a Catalan and Republican intellectual woman forced into self-exile during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Silvia Roig is a Faculty Member, BMCC Department of Modern Languages, The City University of New York.




Foreign Women Authors under Fascism and Francoism


Book Description

This collection of essays highlights cultural features and processes which characterized translation practice under the dictatorships of Benito Mussolini (1922-1940) and Francisco Franco (1939-1975). In spite of the different timeline, some similarities and parallelisms may be drawn between the power of the Fascist and the Francoist censorships exerted on the Italian and Spanish publishing and translation policies. Entrusted to European specialists, this collection of articles brings to the fore the “microhistory” that exists behind every publishing proposal, whether collective or individual, to translate a foreign woman writer during those two totalitarian political periods. The nine chapters presented here are not a global study of the history of translation in those black times in contemporary culture, but rather a collection of varied cases, small stories of publishers, collections, translations and translators that, despite many disappointments but with the occasional success, managed to undermine the ideological and literary currents of the dictatorships of Mussolini and Franco.







Mercè Rodoreda


Book Description

This annotated bibliography of one of the best-known Catalan authors selects and comments on 198 critical narrative works, including nine biographical studies. It provides a detailed analysis of the critical perspectives which have been used to analyze Rodoreda's works, referring the reader to the bibliographical entries which best illustrate certain theoretical approaches or themes.




The Death in their Eyes


Book Description

Images that embody the point of view of the perpetrators of violent crimes, or their accomplices, force us to look at the pain of victims through the eyes of those who caused it. Accompanied by over sixty visuals of historically infamous violence, The Death in their Eyes goes beyond the visible aspects of images to reveal what has been left outside of the frame. Covering human abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib, the Auschwitz Album, religious desecration during the Spanish Civil War, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film made at the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942, and detainees at the S-21 torture center in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, this volume proposes a rigorous new methodology for analyzing perpetrator images, in photography and film, that continue to be used and re-appropriated in today’s media. Content warning: This book contains images of victims of murder and torture which are essential to the author’s analysis.




The Ghost in the Constitution


Book Description

A book that offers new directions in the study of memory in Spain, written by one of the world's leading scholars of contemporary Spanish culture.




Catalan Women Writers and Artists


Book Description

Paul Ilie's theories of internal exile as well as Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva on the problems of subjectivity guide the readings of the visual and verbal texts."--BOOK JACKET.







National Union Catalog


Book Description




The Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919


Book Description

Within the framework of a global political and sanitarian crisis that broke out in March 2020, this book proposes a new contemporary look at the great pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. Based on its impact in Spain, the book offers a comparative and transatlantic perspective focused on the political and cultural impact of the pandemic in Europe and Latin America. The book focuses on three aspects: the overwhelming presence of influenza between 1918 and 1920, its oblivion and its political and cultural traces in the interwar decades and even more, and its reappearance in the face of the COVID-19. These three aspects are interconnected through a comparative analysis of the crisis of liberalism and democracy of the 1920s and 1930s and the current populist wave that is affecting the world. As such, this book is of great value to those interested in social and medical history across Europe and Latin America through offering a fresh outlook on the effects of the pandemic of the 20th century in the wake of the COVID pandemic that swept across the world.