Galdós and Beethoven


Book Description




Galdós: Fortunata and Jacinta


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A new critical introduction to Galdos' four-part masterpiece set in Madrid in the 1870s.




The Jew in the Novels of Benito Perez Galdos


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A study of Galdós' Jewish characters and what they tell us about the place of Jews in C19th Spanish society and culture. Few Spanish novelists have dealt with the problem of religion and religious commitment more comprehensively than Benito Pérez Galdós. His lifelong preoccupation with man in search of transendence repeatedly led him to evaluate andcriticize the religious institutions that stifled rather than helped man in his search. In the Jews, Galdós saw a people who, though victimized by religious intolerance, managed to survive persecution and affirm an abiding faithin God. He created Jewish characters throughout his long literary career and therefore presents the most comprehensive portrait of Jews as they existed in the culture, the religion and fabric of C19th Spanish society.




Galdos and the Art of the European Novel


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Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) was one of Spain's outstanding novelists and the author of two vast cycles of novels and a number of plays. In this critical study of Galdos in English, Stephen Gilman relates the writer and his work to the nineteenth century novel as a genre and traces his artistic growth during a twenty-year period, from his initial historical fable, La Fontana de Oro, to his masterpiece, Fortunata y Jacinta. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.







Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men


Book Description

Bly's principal revelation is that Galdós deliberately and consistently used this secondary type to emphasize the significance of the major plot developments and to underline the strengths or weaknesses of principal characters. In filling these roles the eccentric old men develop from comic shallow types into more complex secondary characters, men of insight and wisdom, who occupy a pivotal position in the novels.




Conflicts and Conciliations


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Between 1881 and 1897, Benito P rez Gald s, generally acknowledged as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist, composed some twenty "contemporary" novels, which Geoffrey Ribbans characterizes as the peak of his achievement. This monumental study traces the evolution of the many strands that make up one of them: the long and complex novel Fortunata y Jacinta. Ribbans examines the various stages of composition, not only the earlier, reconstructed Alpha version but also subsequent revisions in the much corrected handwritten text and in the printer's galleys. He treats these tentative drafts as part of the process of reaching out toward the coherent definitive text. Ribbans's analysis of such devices as the ambiguous role of the narrator, the use of free indirect style and direct dialogue, and the construction of distinctive ideolects leads to the heart of his study, the development of Gald s's characters.




Inventing High and Low


Book Description

Dire word of the cultural threat of the lowbrow goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and yet, Stephanie Sieburth suggests, no division between "high" and "low" culture will stand up to logical scrutiny. Why, then, does the opposition persist? In this book Sieburth questions the terms of this perennial debate and uncovers the deep cultural, economic, and psychological tensions that lead each generation to reinvent the distinction between high and low. She focuses on Spain, where this opposition plays a special role in notions of cultural development and where leading writers have often made the relation of literature to mass culture the theme of their novels. Choosing two historical moments of sweeping material and cultural change in Spanish history, Sieburth reads two novels from the 1880s (by Benito Pérez Galdós) and two from the 1970s (by Juan Goytisolo and Carmen Martín Gaite) as fictional theories about the impact of modernity on culture and politics. Her analysis reveals that the high/low division in the cultural sphere reinforces other kinds of separations--between social classes or between men and women--dear to the elite but endangered by progress. This tension, she shows, is particularly evident in Spain, where modernization has been a contradictory and uneven process, rarely accompanied by political freedom, and where consumerism and mass culture coexist uneasily with older ways of life. Weaving together a wide spectrum of diverse material, her work will be of interest to readers concerned with Spanish history and literature, literary theory, popular culture, and the relations between politics, economics, gender, and the novel.




Dissonances of Modernity


Book Description

Dissonances of Modernity illuminates the ways in which music, as an artifact, a practice, and a discourse redefines established political, social, gender, and cultural conventions in Modern Spain. Using the notion of dissonance as a point of departure, the volume builds on the insightful approaches to the study of music and society offered by previous analyses in regards to the central position they give to identity as a socially and historically constructed concept, and continues their investigation on the interdependence of music and society in the Iberian Peninsula. While other serious studies of the intersections of music and literature in Spain have focused on contemporary usage, Dissonances of Modernity looks back across the centuries, seeking the role of music in the very formation of identity in the peninsula. The volume's historical horizon reaches from the nineteenth-century War of Africa to the Catalan working class revolutions and Enric Granados' central role in Catalan identity; from Francisco Barbieri's Madrid to the Wagnerian's influence in Benito Perez Galdos' prose; and from the predicaments surrounding national anthems to the use of the figure of Carmen in Francoist' cinema. This volume is a timely scholarly addition that contemplates not only a broad corpus that innovatively comprises popular and high culture--zarzuelas, choruses of industrial workers, opera, national anthems--but also their inter-dependence in the artists' creativity.