Jeremy Robbins

Baltasar Gracián y Morales

A classic on power to stand alongside Machiavelli and Marcus Aurelius. With aphorisms ranging from "find everyone's weak spot" to "quit whilst fortune is smiling, as all good gamblers do," this engrossing classic of the Spanish Golden Age offers pragmatic, hardheaded, and coldly- calculated advice on how to thrive in a cut-throat world. Its three hundred maxims were originally written in Spanish more than four hundred years ago and are as applicable to modern life as they are to the dynamics of Spanish Baroque society.

The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence

Edwin Wiliamson

This volume commemorates the quatercentenary of Don Quijote (Part I, 1604-05), widely acknowledged to be the 'first modern novel'. Through Don Quijote, his Exemplary Novels and other major works, Cervantes, Spain's master novelist, has for centuries shaped and profoundly influenced the different literatures and cultures of numerous countries throughout the world. Containing chapters written in both English and Spanish by leading scholars worldwide, this book deals with topics as fundamental and diverse as contested discourses in Don Quijote, psychology and comic characters in Golden-Age literature, the title of Cervantes' master novel, and Cervantes, Shakespeare and the birth of metatheatre. A special issue of the journal Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

Essays in Memory of E.C. Riley on the Quatercentenary of Don Quijote

Cervantes

Detailed consideration of the poetry of the literary academies, with particular attention paid to the literary and social role of the academies in 17c Spain.

Love Poetry of the Literary Academies in the Reigns of Philip IV and Charles II

Arts of Perception offers a new account of a key period in Spanish history and culture and a fundamental reassessment of its major writers and intellectuals, including Gracián, Quevedo, Calderón, Saavedra Fajardo, López de Vega, and Sor Juana. Reading these figures in the context of European thought and the new science, and philosophy, the study considers how they developed various ‘arts of perception’ - complex perceptual strategies designed to overcome and exploit epistemic problems to enable an individual to act effectively in the moral, political, social or religious sphere. The study takes as its subject the distinctive epistemological mentality behind such ‘arts of perception’. This mentality was fostered by the creative interaction of scepticism and Stoicism, and found expression in the key concepts ser/parecer and engaño/desengaño. The work traces the emergence, development, and impact of these concepts on Spanish thought and culture. As well as offering new interpretations of specific major figures, Arts of Perception offers an interpretation of the mentality of an entire culture as it made the fraught transition to intellectual modernity. As such it ranges over numerous discourses and formative contexts and provides a wealth of new material which will be of use to all those seeking to understand and interpret the literature, culture and thought of Golden Age Spain. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Bulletin of Spanish Studies.

The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580-1720

Arts of Perception

Ann L Mackenzie

Published in memory of Ivy L. McClelland, a pioneer-scholar of Spain’s eighteenth century, this volume of original essays contains, besides an Introduction to her career and internationally influential writings, three previously unpublished essays by McClelland and nine studies by other scholars, all of which are focused on elucidating the Enlightenment and its characteristic manifestations in the Hispanic world. Among the Enlightenment writers and artists, works and genres, themes and issues discussed, are: Nicolás Moratín and epic poetry, Lillo’s The London Merchant and English and French influences on eighteenth-century Spanish drama, José Marchena and literary historiography, oppositions and misunderstandings within Spanish society as reflected in El sí de las niñas, Goya and the visual arts, Quintana’s Pelayo and historical tragedy, Enlightenment discourse, the Periodical Press, theatre as propaganda, the ideology and politics of Empire, the roots of revolt in late viceregal Quito, women’s experience of Enlightenment in Spain, social and cultural difference in colonial Peru, ideological debate and uncertainty during the Age of Reason, eighteenth-century Spain on the nineteenth-century stage, and public opinion in Spain on the eve of the French, and European, Revolution. First published as a Special Issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies (LXXXVI [November–December 2009], Nos 7–8), this book will be of value and stimulus to all scholars concerned to investigate and interpret the culture, theatre, ideology, society and politics of the Enlightenment in Spain, Europe and Spanish America.

Hesitancy and Experimentation in Enlightenment Spain and Spanish America

This original and lucidly written book introduces the reader to the Baroque, the richest period of Spanish literature and culture. Jeremy Robbins shows how its creativity responded directly to the unprecedented sense of uncertainty fostered by developments across Europe. He argues that it was above all this scepticism which led Spaniards to employ literature and art to question the boundaries of reality and illusion. The result was the creation of some of the most inventive, entertaining, challenging and powerful works of imagination in Europe. Currently there exists no other concise introduction to Spanish Baroque literature and culture. The book considers in detail works by the major novelists, dramatists, poets and painters. Part of its novel approach is the attention the author gives to key issues such as honour and identity, the influence of social and literary institutions like the court and the church, and the place of women as both creators and consumers of culture. It also considers neglected literary forms, such as the aphorism and the emblem, as well as the immensely popular and influential political and moral writings of the day. A comprehensive glossary to major and minor figures is included.

Jeremy Robbins

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