Fashioned Texts and Painted Books

Fashioned Texts and Painted Books
Author: Erin E. Edgington
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2017-10-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 146963578X

Fashioned Texts and Painted Books examines the folding fan's multiple roles in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on the fan's identity as a symbol of feminine sexuality, as a collectible art object, and, especially, as an alternative book form well suited to the reception of poetic texts, the study highlights the fan's suitability as a substrate for verse, deriving from its myriad associations with coquetry and sex, flight, air, and breath. Close readings of Stephane Mallarme's eventails of the 1880s and 1890s and Paul Claudel's Cent phrases pour eventails (1927) consider both text and paratext as they underscore the significant visual interest of this poetry. Works in prose and in verse by Octave Uzanne, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Proust, along with fan leaves by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Gauguin, serve as points of comparison that deepen our understanding of the complex interplay of text and image that characterizes this occasional subgenre. Through its interrogation of the correspondences between form and content in fan poetry, this study demonstrates that the fan was, in addition to being a ubiquitous fashion accessory, a significant literary and art historical object straddling the boundary between East and West, past and present, and high and low art.

The First Book of Fashion

The First Book of Fashion
Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1474249906

This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.

The Imagery of Interior Spaces

The Imagery of Interior Spaces
Author: Michael J. Kelly
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2019
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1950192199

On the unstable boundaries between "interior" and "exterior," "private" and "public," and always in some way relating to a "beyond," the imagery of interior space in literature reveals itself as an often disruptive code of subjectivity and of modernity. The wide variety of interior spaces elicited in literature -- from the odd room over the womb, secluded parks, and train compartments, to the city as a world under a cloth -- reveal a common defining feature: these interiors can all be analyzed as codes of a paradoxical, both assertive and fragile, subjectivity in its own unique time and history. They function as subtexts that define subjectivity, time, and history as profoundly ambiguous realities, on interchangeable existential, socio-political, and epistemological levels. This volume addresses the imagery of interior spaces in a number of iconic and also lesser known yet significant authors of European, North American, and Latin American literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: Djuna Barnes, Edmond de Goncourt, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Benito Pérez Galdós, Elsa Morante, Robert Musil, Jules Romains, Peter Waterhouse, and Émile Zola.

Feeling the Gaze

Feeling the Gaze
Author: Gail Bulman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1469667444

Feeling the Gaze explores the visual elements in eight contemporary Argentine and Chilean theater performances. Gail A. Bulman shows how staged images can awaken spectators' emotions to activate their intellect, provoking nuanced and deep contemplation of social, historical, and political themes. Ranging from simple props, costumes, body movements and spatial constructions to integrated media and digital images, the aesthetic components in these pieces engage to forge multifaceted storytelling, stimulate the public's relation to memory, and create affective bonds that help build individual and collective social consciousness. Recent innovations in Southern Cone theatre aesthetics have been shifting traditional performance/spectator relationships and animating ideological discussions. The various works presented here give readers a holistic understanding of the emerging prominence of visuality and affect as a vehicle for political advocacy in Latin American theatre and performance. The book asks us to consider the formation of new spectator-performance bonds as authors, directors, and theatre groups increasingly turn toward alternative settings for their work. Lingering visual memories of the performances, together with the feelings that the performative experience stirs up, provide spectators with an enduring focal point through which to reflect on and judge what is "beyond" the performed scenes. Staged live in the Southern Cone and internationally since 2014, these plays demonstrate the transgressive power of the visual to make spectators see, feel, and potentially act against injustices and violence. This study offers comprehensive critical discussions of Teatro Banda's O'Higgins: un hombre en pedazos; Teatro Nino Proletario's Fulgor; Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas's Manual de carrona; Agustin Leon Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cupula; Teatro la Maria's Los millonarios; Claudio Tolcachir's Proximo; Sergio Blanco's Tebas Land; and Lola Arias's Doble de Riesgo.

Rewriting the Orient

Rewriting the Orient
Author: Yunfei Bai
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469681862

In this ambitious volume, Yunfei Bai delves into the creative adaptations of classical Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan literary texts by four renowned nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors in France and Argentina: Theophile Gautier, Stephane Mallarme, Victor Segalen, and Jorge Luis Borges. Without any knowledge of the source languages, the authors crafted their own French and Spanish retellings based on received translations of these Asian works. Rewriting the Orient not only explores the so far untapped translation-rewriting continuum to trace the pivotal role of Orientalism in the formation of a singular corpus of world literature that goes beyond the Anglophone canon, but also sheds light on a wide range of innovative discursive strategies that readily challenge traditional notions of cultural appropriation.

Interpretaciones

Interpretaciones
Author: Rudyard J. Alcocer
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2023-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469676672

Interpretaciones: Experimental Criticism and the Metrics of Latin American Literature examines readers' reactions to short texts during crucial moments of the reading experience. These readers are students at universities in the US and several Spanish-speaking countries. Far from reducing the reading experience to a series of numbers, the data-driven approaches in the study instead underline the startling complexity and elusiveness of seemingly basic literary processes and concepts, including those pertaining to authorship, titles, conclusions, and so on. Simultaneously, Interpretaciones suggests alternative methodologies for gaining new and unexpected knowledge about literary texts themselves, whether from Latin America or elsewhere. Interpretaciones is an ambitious, interdisciplinary project geared toward those interested in literary theory, Latin American and Caribbean literature, and the nexus between literature and science.

The Resilient Apocalypse

The Resilient Apocalypse
Author: Julia Alexis Kushigian
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2024
Genre: Apocalypse in literature
ISBN: 1469681900

"Portraits of 'good battling evil' in the geography of Hell come in many forms in the Hispanic World. Apocalyptic nightmares, fearful images of life, chaos and death are inclusive and interdepEndent, yet simultaneously project an exceptional quality. Where images remain unfulfilled in narrow allegiances to a proscribed End, this investigation explores how narrative logic may challenge unified notions of finalities. Redeploying transglobal character and narrative potential, it distinguishes itself by training the lens on New Beginnings. Its analysis embeds resilient formulas for combating the End through resistance in Latin America and Spain revealed in gilded illustration, decolonizing drama, messianic chronicles and poetry, baroque letters, racially-motivated novels, sexuality-threatening films, and intimidating immigrant photos complete with destruction wreaked by climate change. Through chaos the resilient Apocalypse simultaneously performs as an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance). Its strategy listens to and keeps the enemy 'in sight and in mind,' a formula for grappling with and engaging difference that analyzes the traces left on each other's cultural fabric in an open-Ended, communal struggle. This study argues for decolonizing the politics of the End and reformulating an incomplete, mythical, uncanny quality into a poetics of resistance garnering communal solutions and obligations. Here the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to redefine social justice, salvation and reality over time and past collateral damage, ironically providing future hope against itself, the crushing fear of the End. It crystalizes what had yet to be comprehensively explored: how rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews to arrive at sustainable plans of action, time-tested, reputable cultural models to control dissension from within and without, and social goals supported by traces the other imprints on their cultural ethos. Bracketing the finality of the End and arguing the process from conflict archaeology toward New Beginnings, salvation, solace or hope, resolves an incomplete myth by negotiating the afterward. Revealing how plural, competing viewpoints of the End go a long way to legitimize each other, this theory of unfulfilled promise forever changes the way we engage the other and value the self"

Tratado de la redondez de la tierra

Tratado de la redondez de la tierra
Author: Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2023-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1469677121

Esta es la primera edicion critica en espanol del Tratado sobre la redondez de la Tierra, ensayo cosmologico y geografico nacido de la "ciencia infusa" (conocimento transmitido por la divinidad), atribuido a Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda (Agreda, Soria, Espana, 1602-1665). Maria Coronel de Arana es posiblemente una de las figuras mas misteriosas y controvertidas de la Edad Moderna. No solo como personaje historico o literario, su vida y su obra reunen numerosos aspectos aun por descifrar que han dado lugar a una sugerente mitologia cultural de dimension transatlantica, abierta a sumar nuevas interpretaciones y significados. Figura politica, teologica y legendaria, Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda se transforma en un significante cultural que no deja de acumular capas de sentido. Una de ellas, todavia poco explorada, es la atribucion del Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra. Este volumen indaga en las razones para la atribucion a Sor Maria de Jesus, considerando su dimension de imagen cultural y transoceanica que rebasa la individualidad concreta. Tratamos diferentes aspectos de la vida, la obra, el contexto cultural y la tradicion desde la que se la leyo y puede leerse tambien en el siglo XXI. El Tratado se enmarca en el espacio de produccion cultural femenina conventual, sin el que no puede entenderse la figura de la autora, ni la escritura de mujeres en la epoca, no solo observando los generos mas conocidos del convento, sino una tradicion todavia por recuperar: la del conocimiento cientifico, que, aunque presente entre sus muros, apenas ha recibido atencion critica.