Esther Tusquets


Book Description

The present volume reviews and revisits the life and work of Spanish writer, editor, and intellectual Esther Tusquets (1936–2012). The author of some seven novels, three collections of short stories, two books for children, seven volumes of essays and memoirs, and an extensive corpus of journalistic and other short prose texts, Tusquets’s contributions to contemporary Spanish culture and literature are vast and heterogeneous. Most academic scholarship to date has been dedicated to Tusquets’s groundbreaking novelistic trilogy (El mismo mar de todos los veranos [1978], El amor es un juego solitario [1979], Varada tras el último naufragio [1980]) and to her unified short-story collection, Siete miradas en el mismo paisaje (1979). The essays contained in Esther Tusquets: Scholarly Correspondences offer new readings of the author’s canonical fiction and delve into the largely unexplored terrain of her non-fiction. Participating faculty-scholars include Nina L. Molinaro (University of Colorado at Boulder); Maureen Tobin Stanley (University of Minnesota Duluth); Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva (Western Kentucky University); Laura Lonsdale (Queen’s College, University of Oxford); Stacey Dolgin Casado (University of Georgia); Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London); María Elena Soliño (University of Houston); Mayte de Lama (Elon University); Catherine G. Bellver (University of Nevada, Las Vegas); Rosalía Cornejo Parriego (University of Ottawa); Meri Torras Francès (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona); and Mary S. Vázquez (Davidson College). The volume concludes with a complete bibliography by Tiffany L. Malloy of works by and about Tusquets.




Reading Iberia


Book Description

This book is an edited volume of eleven specially-commissioned essays by a range of established and emerging UK-based Hispanists, which assess recent developments in the disciplines falling under the umbrella of 'Iberian Studies'. These essays, which cover a wide range of time periods and geographical areas, but are united by the common question of what it means to 'Read Iberia', offer an invigorating critique of many of the critical assumptions shaping the study of Iberian languages and literatures. This volume offers a timely intervention into the debate about the current repositioning of language/literature disciplines within the UK university. Its intellectual starting point is the need for a committed and incisive re-evaluation of the role of literature and the way we teach and research it. The contributors address this issue from a diverse range of linguistic, cultural and theoretical backgrounds, drawing on both familiar and not-so-familiar texts and authors to question common reference points and critical assumptions. The volume offers not only a new and invigorating space for reimagining Iberian Studies from within, but also - through its commitment to interdisciplinary debate - an opportunity to raise the profile of Iberian Studies outside the community of academic Hispanists.




The Same Sea as Every Summer


Book Description

Poetic and erotic, El mismo mar de todos los veranos (The Same Sea As Every Summer) was originally published in Spain in 1978, three years after the death of Franco and in the same year that government censorship was abolished. But even in a new era that fostered more liberal attitudes toward divorce, homosexuality, and women's rights, this novel by Esther Tusquets was controversial. Its feminine view of sexuality--in particular, its depiction of a lesbian relationship--was unprecedented in Spanish fiction. Now its complex moods and rhythms have been caught in an English translation by Margaret E. W. Jones that has won the Kayden National Translation Award. The disillusioned narrator of The Same Sea As Every Summer is a middle-aged woman whose unhappy life prompts a journey into she past to rediscover a more authentic self. However, events force her to realize that love or trust will inevitably be repaid by betrayal. This pattern assumes various forms in a story that moves forward as well as backward, playing out in Barcelona among the haute bourgeoisie. Richly textured with allusion, The Same Sea As Every Summer is also a commentary on post-Civil War Spanish society by an author who grew up during the repressive Franco regime. Esther Tusquets's other novels include El amor es un juego solitano (1979) and Para no volver (1985).




Stranded


Book Description

Stranded is a novel about love and betrayal among friends and lovers, husbands and wives. For years, Elia and her husband Jorge have spent their summers with their friends Eva and Pablo at a resort town on the Costa Brava. This summer, Elia arrives alone--silent, desolate, and wishing to become as inert as a stone. Jorge has left her and her world has collapsed.




The Collected Works of Langston Hughes


Book Description

The sixteen volumes are published with the goal that Hughes pursued throughout his lifetime: making his books available to the people. Each volume will include a biographical and literary chronology by Arnold Rampersad, as well as an introduction by a Hughes scholar lume introductions will provide contextual and historical information on the particular work.




Private Correspondence


Book Description

Esther Tusquets was already well known in Spain as director of the Barcelona publishing house Editorial Lumen when she stunned the reading public in the late 70s and 80s with the publication of a highly acclaimed narrative cycle whose daringly innovative content and prose style broke new ground for the Spanish novel and for women's writing.




Post/Imperial Encounters


Book Description

Spanish and English are two of the most widely spoken languages in today’s world, and are linked by a colonial presence in the Americas that has often provoked turbulent relations between Britain and Spain. Despite abundant exchanges between Spain and the British Isles, and evident contact in the Americas, cross-cultural analyses are infrequent, and ironically language barriers still prevail in a world the media and globalization would appear to render borderless: English and Hispanic Studies have seldom converged, the islands of the Caribbean continue to be separated by language, while the new empire, the United States, has difficulty in admitting to its Hispanic component, let alone recognizing that the name “America” encompasses a wider continent. Post/Imperial Encounters: Anglo-Hispanic Cultural Relations attempts to bridge this gap through articles on literature, history and culture that concentrate primarily on three periods: the colonial interventions of Britain and Spain in the Americas, the Spanish Civil War and the present world, with its global culture and new forms of colonialism.




Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era


Book Description

Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era explores the lives of the leading Spanish conservatives in the turbulent period 1914-1945. The volume is a collection of biographies of the most important figures of the Spanish Right during the last years of the Restoration, the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Second Republic, the Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime. This book brings together a number of leading historians of twentieth-century Spain. By adopting a biographical approach, the volume aims at providing a new insight of the origins, development and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to the traditional view, Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era shows a diverse and fragmented Spanish right which, far from being isolated, was profoundly influenced by German Nazism, Italian Fascism and French Traditionalism. This remarkable and innovative collection of essays will be welcomed by students and lecturers of Spanish history alike.




A Companion to Spanish Women's Studies


Book Description

This volume presents an overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of women's studies, including original essays by pioneering scholars as well as by younger specialists. New pathfinding models of theoretical analysis are balanced with a careful revisiting of the historical foundations of women's studies.




White Ink


Book Description

An analysis of the use made of five structuring devices, or motifs -- the Bildungsroman, the patriarchal prison, the fairy tale, sexual politics and gender trouble --in a selection of representative women's novels from Spain and Latin America written between 1936 and the present. STEPHEN M. HART is Reader in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London.