The Mystic Soul Of Spain

This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

Originally published in 1951, this volume gives a general survey of the Golden Age of Spanish mysticism, following this with translations of extracts from 15 leading authors in this field. The selections from each author are preceded by details of editions and studies, thereby making this not only an authoritative study on the treasures of Spanish mysticism but also a valuable anthology and starting point for further reading.

The seventh and penultimate book of the letters of American philosopher George Santayana, covering the years 1941 to 1947 and including letters to such correspondents as Daniel Cory, John Hall Wheelock, Robert Lowell, and others. This penultimate volume of Santayana's letters chronicles Santayana's life during a difficult time--the war years and the immediate postwar period. The advent of World War II left Santayana isolated in Rome, and the difficulties of wartime travel across borders forced him to abandon plans to move to more agreeable locations in Switzerland or Spain. During these years, Santayana lived in a single room in a nursing home run by the Blue Sisters of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, where, during the winter months, he did much of his writing in bed (wearing well-mended gloves) in order to stay warm. And yet, despite wartime deprivations, illness, and old age (he was 77 in 1941), Santayana was remarkably productive, completing both his autobiography Persons and Places and The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: or God in Man, and all but completing Dominations and Powers. He confided to one correspondent that he had never been more at peace or more happy. The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. Letters in Book Seven are written to such correspondents as his friend and protégée Daniel Cory, his financial manager and heir George Sturgis, and the American poet Robert Lowell. The correspondence with Lowell--which began when the younger writer sent Santayana a copy of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lord Weary's Castle--signals an important new friendship, which became a source of affection and intellectual engagement in Santayana's final years.

Does fiction do more than just represent space? Can our experiences with fictional storytelling be in themselves spatial? In Constructing Spain: The Re-imagination of Space and Place in Fiction and Film, Nathan Richardson explores relations between cultural representation and spatial transformation across fifty years of Spanish culture. Beginning in 1953, the year Spanish space was officially reopened to Western thought and capital, and culminating in 2003, the year of Aznar's unpopular involvement of his country in the second Iraq War, Richardson traces in popular and critically acclaimed fiction and film an evolution in Spanish storytelling that, while initially representative in nature, increasingly engages its audience in spatial practices that go beyond mere perception or conception of local material geographies. In original readings of films by Luis Berlanga, Luis Bu uel, Alex de la Iglesia, Alejandro Amen bar, and Julio Medem, and novels by Juan Goytisolo, Antonio Mu oz Molina, and Javier Mar as, Richardson shows this formal evolution as a necessary response to developments, restorations, and transformations of local landscapes that resulted during these years from various human migrations, tourist-invasions, urban development plans, resurgent nationalisms, and finally globalization. As these changes occur, Richardson traces a shift in the works studied from mere representation of spatial change toward actual engagement with shifting physical and social geographies, as they inch ever closer toward the production of an actual spatial experience for their audiences. In the final chapters of this book, Richardson offers in-depth and highly original readings of the storytelling projects of Medem and Mar as in particular, showing how these two artists invite readers to not only reconceive hegemonic notions of space and place, but to practice alternative notions of being-in-place. In these final readings, Constructing Spain, points to the newest developments in contemporary Spanish narrative and film, a rise of new grammars of creation to challenge the ongoing capital-driven creative destruction of globalized Spanish geography.

This critical survey examines the work of twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars about Spanish mystical literature. It particularly attends to how these scholars’ ideas were influenced by their notions of mysticism and Spain’s contested relationship to the Orient.

Metzger, Isobel Mackay (author's daughter)