Baroque Lorca

Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba). Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association Baroque style—with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle—might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea. The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century. Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.

The landmark poetry of Federico García Lorca in a bilingual edition and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner W. S. Merwin.

Explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity which polarised Spanish society prior to the Civil War. This title exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural vanguards.

In Lorca’s Legacy, Jonathan Mayhew explores multiple aspects of the creative and critical afterlife of Federico García Lorca, the most internationally recognized Spanish poet and playwright of the twentieth century. Lorca is an iconic and charismatic figure who has evoked the admiration and fascination of musicians, poets, painters, and playwrights across the world since his tragic assassination by right-wing forces in 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. This volume ranges widely, discussing his influence on American theater, his much-debated lecture on the duende, his delayed encounter with queer theory, his influence on contemporary Spanish poetry, and other relevant topics. The critical literature on Lorca is vast, and original contributions are comparatively rare, but Mayhew has found a way to shed fresh light on his legacy by looking with a critical eye at the creative transformations of his life and work, both in Spain and abroad. Lorca’s Legacy celebrates the wealth of material inspired by Lorca, bringing to bear a sophisticated, theoretically informed critical perspective. This book will be of enormous interest to anyone interested in the international projection of Spanish literature, or anyone who has felt the fascination of Lorca’s duende.

This volume of essays commemorates and celebrates the creative works of Frederico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, and Luis Bunel, three contemporaries and friends. The essays suggest that the artistic creations of Lorca, Dali, and Bunel feature theoretical ideas on (their) contemporary art in general, as well as on the particualr art form cultivated by each- ideas that help us to better understand their work as it relates to a wide rane of aesthetic theories.

Robert Bovington is an Englishman living in Spain. He is so enthralled with his adopted country that it has inspired him to write about his experiences. From Almeria in sun-kissed Andalucia to Zaragoza in historic Aragon, the author takes us on a tour of Spain. We visit the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Cordoba's Mezquita and the Cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. We explore Spain's diverse natural landscapes - the Picos de Europa, the Sierra Nevada and the vast plains of La Mancha. During our travels, we will encounter famous Spaniards - Isaac Albeniz, Pablo Picasso and many others. Football, fiestas and flamenco are experienced whilst food and drink, Spanish style, is on the menu. We will encounter Romanesque cathedrals, Gothic churches, Moorish castles, Modernist civil buildings and beautiful plazas. Throughout the journey, the keyword is diversity. It is this diversity that has inspired Robert Bovington to provide us with his Spanish Impressions

From Here to Diversity: Globalization and Intercultural Dialogues sees interculturalism as movement, transit, travel, and the dynamics between cultures. Contemporary intercultural travel is a global journey, a circumnavigation at the speed of light that underwrites all the comings and goings, the departures and arrivals, the transmissions and receptions that are implicit in this title. Hence, From Here to Diversity examines the motivations, characteristics and implications of cultural interactions in their perpetual movement, devoid of spatial or temporal borders, in a dangerous but stimulating indefinition of limits. In the contemporary intercultural dialogue, new voices are making themselves heard, as valuable sources of study: the voices of women; non-occidentals; the non-powerful; forgotten narratives of a past that was as intercultural as the present (after all, what is colonialism other than a perverse form of interculturality?); global entertainment; tourism; oral literature; diaries; mythical narratives; the cinema; ethnography; and new teachings, among so many others. Because this project is also intercultural at its source and subject, From Here to Diversity: Globalization and Intercultural Dialogues adds to the coherence of the project by including contributions from the most wide-ranging backgrounds and nationalities, without fear of the alterity that, after all, we propose to study.