The King & the Adulteress


Book Description

This is a psychoanalytic study of Madame Bovary and King Lear that produces radically different and compelling understanding of these works.




The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark


Book Description

In this groundbreaking book, Dennis R. MacDonald offers an entirely new view of the New Testament gospel of Mark. The author of the earliest gospel was not writing history, nor was he merely recording tradition, MacDonald argues. Close reading and careful analysis show that Mark borrowed extensively from the Odyssey and the Iliad and that he wanted his readers to recognise the Homeric antecedents in Mark's story of Jesus. Mark was composing a prose anti-epic, MacDonald says, presenting Jesus as a suffering hero modeled after but far superior to traditional Greek heroes. Much like Odysseus, Mark's Jesus sails the seas with uncomprehending companions, encounters preternatural opponents, and suffers many things before confronting rivals who have made his house a den of thieves. In his death and burial, Jesus emulates Hector, although unlike Hector Jesus leaves his tomb empty. Mark's minor characters, too, recall Homeric predecessors: Bartimaeus emulates Tiresias; Joseph of Arimathea, Priam; and the women at the tomb, Helen, Hecuba, and Andromache. And, entire episodes in Mark mirror Homeric episodes, including stilling the sea, walking on water, feeding the multitudes, the Triumphal E




The Adulteress on the Spanish Stage


Book Description

As early as 1760 and as late as 1920, Romantic drama dominated Peninsular Spanish theater. This love affair with Romanticism influenced the formation of Spain's modern national identity, which depended heavily on defining women's place in 19th century society. Women who defied traditional gender roles became a source of anxiety in society and on stage. The adulteress embodied the fear of rebellious women, the growing pains of modernity and the political instability of war and invasion. This book examines the conflicted portrayal of women and the Spanish national identity. Studying the adulteress on stage, the author provides insight into the uneasy tension between progress and tradition in 19th century Spain.







Types and Motifs of the Judeo-Spanish Folktales (RLE Folklore)


Book Description

This monumental book, first published in 1992, represents a major contribution to Sephardic and Hispanic studies as well as to comparative folklore scholarship in a worldwide perspective. After many years of fieldwork and extensive archival investigations in Spain, Israel and the United States, the author has brought together and analysed a massive body of primary sources. This is the first collection of Sephardic narratives offered to the English-speaking reader, and constitutes an important addition to the understanding of Sephardic cultural tradition.




Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy


Book Description

Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy explores the new directions being taken in the study of sex and gender in Italy from 1300 to 1700 and highlights the impact that recent scholarship has had in revealing innovative ways of approaching this subject. In this interdisciplinary volume, twelve scholars of history, literature, art history, and philosophy use a variety of both textual and visual sources to examine themes such as gender identities and dynamics, sexual transgression and sexual identities in leading Renaissance cities. It is divided into three sections, which work together to provide an overview of the influence of sex and gender in all aspects of Renaissance society from politics and religion to literature and art. Part I: Sex, Order, and Disorder deals with issues of law, religion, and violence in marital relationships; Part II: Sense and Sensuality in Sex and Gender considers gender in relation to the senses and emotions; and Part III: Visualizing Sexuality in Word and Image investigates gender, sexuality, and erotica in art and literature. Bringing to life this increasingly prominent area of historical study, Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy is ideal for students of Renaissance Italy and early modern gender and sexuality.




Pieter Bruegel the Elder


Book Description

Barbara Kaminska’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community is the first book-length study focusing on religious paintings by one of the most captivating Netherlandish artists, long celebrated for his secular imagery. In a period marked by a profound religious, economic, and cultural transformation, Bruegel offered his sophisticated urban audience complex biblical images that required an engaged, active viewing, not only sparking learned dinner conversations, but facilitating the negotiation of values seen as critical to maintaining a harmonious society. By considering the novelty of Bruegel’s panels used in convivia alongside his small, intimate grisaille compositions, this study ultimately shows that Bruegel renewed the idiom of religious painting, successfully preserving its ritualistic and meditative functions.




The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden


Book Description

Saint Bridget of Sweden was a mystic and saint, and founder of the Bridgettines after the death of her husband of twenty years. As a child, she had already believed herself to have visions; these became more frequent, and her records of these "Celestial revelations" obtained a great vogue during the Middle Ages. Her visions of the Nativity of Jesus had a great influence on depictions of the Nativity of Jesus in art. This edition contains all that is known today of the visions and prophecies of Saint Brigdet and most of her prayers.




Hogarth's Harlot


Book Description

In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was published in England without comment from the government or Church of England. The author explains this absence of censure through a detailed examination of the parameters of blasphemy in 18th century England.