Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
39,622
result(s) for
"Latin Literature"
Sort by:
Beyond Greek : the beginnings of Latin literature
\"We take the existence of a literature in the Latin language for granted, but the emergence of this literature is a very strange moment in history. Latin literature should probably not have come into being in the form it took. This book explores the opening phase of Latin literature, from 240 to 140 BCE. The period begins with the first stage productions of Greek plays translated into Latin, which were also the first translations of Greek literary texts into any other language; it closes with the Romans in possession of a large-scale literature in Latin based on the literature of the Greeks, together with a developed historical tradition about their past and a mythology that connected them to the inheritance of the Greeks. The book uses a range of comparative evidence from both the ancient and the modern worlds in order to provide a context for understanding what the Romans did. The book recovers a great range of possibilities for cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean, with languages and texts sometimes interchanging quite freely and sometimes being blocked. The book argues that the Roman translation project and the resulting literature were highly anomalous in an ancient context: translation of literature was extremely rare in the world known to the Romans, and the ancient Mediterranean hosted many very successful cultures that had no kind of equivalent to the widely diffused text-based literary systems of the Greeks. The transformation of the Romans' Italian alliance into a Mediterranean imperial power provides the context for the revolution in their cultural life that led to what we call \"Latin literature.\"\" -- Provided by publisher
Book
Thresholds of Illiteracy: Theory, Latin America, and the Crisis of Resistance
Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of \"illiteracy\" as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. \"Illiteracy,\" Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies. This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.-Mexican border. Through a critical examination of the \"illiterate\" effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.
eBook
Exploring Latino cultures through crafts
\"From weavings to pinatas to pottery, these fun, easy crafts introduce you to the vibrant and diverse world of Latino cultures.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America
An unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged. Each of these writers guided their readers through a constantly changing cityscape and advised them on matters of cultural taste, using their ties to journalism and their participation in urban practice to share accessible wisdom and establish their role as intellectual arbiters. The intimate ties they developed with their audience fostered a permeable concept of literature that would pave the way for overtly politically engaged chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s. Providing comparative analysis as well as reflection on the evolution of this important genre, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America is the first systematic study of the Latin American writers who forged a new reading public in the early twentieth century.
eBook
Sexing the World
From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender-masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora).Sexing the Worldsurveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite.
Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as \"dust\" (pulvis) or \"tree bark\" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories.
Sexing the Worldcontributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.
eBook
Mayaya Rising
Who are the Black heroines of Latin America and the Caribbean? Where do we turn for models of transcendence among women of African ancestry in the region? In answer to the historical dearth of such exemplars, Mayaya Rising explores and celebrates the work of writers who intentionally center powerful female cultural archetypes. In this inventive analysis, Duke proposes three case studies and a corresponding womanist methodology through which to study and rediscover these figures. The musical Cuban-Dominican sisters and former slaves Teodora and Micaela Ginés inspired Aida Cartagena Portalatin's epic poem Yania tierra; the Nicaraguan matriarch of the May Pole, \"Miss Lizzie,\" figures prominently in four anthologies from the country's Bluefields region; and the iconic palenqueras of Cartagena, Colombia are magnified in the work of poets María Teresa Ramírez Neiva and Mirian Díaz Pérez. In elevating these figures and foregrounding these works, Duke restores and repairs the scholarly record.
eBook
Ghost-Watching American Modernity:Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination
In Ghost-Watching American Modernity, Maria del Pilar Blanco revisits nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts from Spanish America and the United States to ask how different landscapes are represented as haunted sites. Moving from foundational fictions to Westerns, Blanco explores the diverse ways in which ghosts and haunting emerge across the American hemisphere for authors who are preoccupied with evoking the experience of geographical transformations during a period of unprecedented development. The book offers an innovative approach that seeks to understand ghosts in their local specificity, rather than as products of generic conventions or as allegories of hidden desires. Its chapters pursue formally attentive readings of texts by Domingo Sarmiento, Henry James, Jose Marti, W. E. B. Du Bois, Juan Rulfo, Felisberto Hernandez, and Clint Eastwood. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of spectrality for scholars in U.S./Latin American Studies, narrative theory, and comparative literature, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
eBook