scholarly journals Sir Walter Scott, Benito Pérez Galdós y la sátira quijotesca de la erudición

Author(s):  
Alfredo Moro Martín

The satire on excessive erudition counts with a long-standing tradition in Western Literature. From its Classical origins, the figure of the ridiculous erudite dunce exhibited a notable presence in the dramatic literature of the seventeenth century, being absorbed by the novel in the eighteenth, where it merges with the figure of the Quixote. The present article tries to relate the figures of Jonathan Oldbuck of Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) and José Augusto Becerro, of Benito Pérez Galdos’ El caballero encantado (1909) with this literary archetype, revealing the profound influence of the eighteenth-century Cervantean tradition in the work of both authors, who employ the Quixotic erudite dunce in similar ways in order to satirize an outdated approach towards the study of history and its narrative embodiment.

Author(s):  
Andrei A. Tereshchuk ◽  

The article studies the reflection of Carlist and ‘Liberal’ mythological concepts, formed in 1830s– 1890s in Spain, in the novel Zumalacárregui by Benito Pérez Galdós. There is given a brief overview of some previous research works concerning Galdós´s National Episodes and the novel Zumalacárregui. The paper focuses on the ways of representation of general Tomás de Zumalacárregui (1788–1835) in the novel and shows the processes of creating the myths related to the general. In the 19–20th centuries, Zumalacárregui became a hero for the representatives of three different ideologies: Carlism, Francoism, and Basque Nationalism. It is shown that mythologization of the general began just after his death in 1835. Based on the text of the novel, there are made conclusions concerning the sources that Galdós used when creating it. The writer studied the most relevant memoirs about the First Carlist War. The paper shows how Galdós’s text was influenced by the memoirs of A. Sabatier, Ch. F. Henningsen, F. von Lichnowsky, J. A. Zarátiegui, F. Fernández de Córdoba, and H. Du-Casse. It is also noted that Galdós could have been inspired by some pictures created in the traditions of ‘Carlist visual art’. It is concluded that the writer used both Carlist and ‘Liberal’ myths concerning Tomás de Zumalacárregui. The text of the novel is divided into two parts, ‘historical’ and ‘narrative’. The ‘historical part’, i. e. a general description of the First Carlist War military operations carried out in 1834–1835, is mainly based on Carlist sources. In this part, the general Zumalacárregui is described as a war hero. The ‘narrative part’ mainly refers to ‘Liberal’ sources. The author introduced in this part a fictional character, priest José Fago, being the general’s ‘double’. Through Fago’s moral doubts and hesitations Galdós showed the internal tension of Zumalacárregui.


Author(s):  
Natania Meeker ◽  
Antónia Szabari

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. The French authors with whom the work begins turn to plants to think through the problems and paradoxes that face all forms of life considered first as matter. Within this framework, plants are ascribed an agency and vitality that might otherwise seem foreign to them, but they are also envisioned as beings that resist incorporation into human contexts and thus have something to teach humans about their limitations and vulnerabilities. Classically, the botanical sciences that develop over the course of the long eighteenth century function as a project for ordering, visualizing, labeling, and classifying life. In Radical Botany, the authors unearth an alternative set of engagements with the plant as a life form—a tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability even as it participates in the production of new representational modes—including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality—and new affects—including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengjun Li

Scholars of late imperial Chinese fiction have demonstrated that Ming ‘literati novels’ possessed both intellectual sophistication and aesthetic seriousness. Nonetheless, the large corpus of mid-length fictional narratives of the Qing remains mired in problematic assumptions about its ostensibly popular nature. The self-commentaried edition ofEmbroidered screen(Xiuping yuan) presents a salient example for reassessing the nature of Qing novels and the reading of fiction in the seventeenth century. First circulated in manuscript copies, extensive auto-commentary was added when the novel was committed to print. The commented edition incorporates different genres—poetry, examination essay, and anecdotal accounts—as well as visual elements, all intended to appeal to elite literati tastes among Qing readers. Its literary, visual, and formal heteroglossia also contributed to its popularity in eighteenth-century Japan, which in turn secured its preservation and eventual modern rediscovery, even while it fell into obscurity in Qing China, most likely due to political censorship.


2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nil Santiáñez

AbstractSometimes, pacifism finds itself in a paradoxical situation. Renouncing war as an acceptable means to settle a dispute, the pacifist runs the risk of neglecting the defense of those whose very existence is threatened by violent forces. When this is the case, pacifism may be considered as a peculiar form of involuntary wrongdoing. This paper explores the dilemmas and the internal inconsistencies of pacifism by means of two different strategies: (1) the analysis of the ethics of war and peace in Benito Pérez Galdós’ Aita Tettauen, and (2) the comparison of said ethics with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ethics as expounded in his Notebooks 1914-1916, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and “A Lecture on Ethics.” This article argues that Galdós deconstructs the dichotomy war/peace by placing pacifism - embodied by the main character, the writer Santiuste - within the structure of war. He does so, however, in an ambiguous way. Instead of openly denouncing or supporting Santiuste’s pacifism, Galdós presents his main character with irony, a literary technique that makes it difficult to determine whether the novel endorses or criticizes Santiuste’s brand of pacifism. Uttered always in absolute terms, ethical propositions go against the boundaries of our language by trying to say what cannot be expressed. Aita Tettauen demonstrates the ambiguity inherent to ethical stances such as pacifism. Galdós, like Wittgenstein years later, placed ethical issues at the boundaries of language.


Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century’s novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period’s philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire seeks to reflect developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and to provide a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period’s texts can come together.


PMLA ◽  
1903 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-423
Author(s):  
Edward Chauncey Baldwin

The writing of “Characters” was at the same time one of the most prolific and the most significant phases of literary activity in the seventeenth century. Though many of these books of “Characters” have been forgotten, the titles of over one hundred and fifty are still remembered—enough certainly to show how popular the fashion of such writing was. Furthermore, its significance becomes apparent when we consider what prose fiction owes to it; for, through the periodical essay of the eighteenth century, the old formal “Character” passed into the novel and become a part of it.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

This chapter begins with a systematic comparison of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles of embodied language through versions of the same narrative in French and English. Lennox’s work as a cultural broker and translator aims not only to bring narratives rooted in the seventeenth century into her contemporary literary world but also to extend their repertoires of embodied language. In her translations, she integrates instances of inner and outer bodily perception and grounds direct speech in the characters’ bodies. With Lennox’s literary magazine The Lady’s Museum, it will be shown how the novel and its embodied style are embedded in a larger world of book learning. The relations that Lennox establishes between the serialised novel, short forms like the maxim, and educational treatises document an understanding of the role of the novel that differs from the indices and abridgements around Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.


Author(s):  
Walter L. Reed

The eighteenth-century English novel was influenced by earlier prose fiction from the Continent; the English improved what others had invented. Individual novels from the Continent were imitated by British novelists; particular genres first developed abroad were adapted by them as well. Spanish novels like Don Quixote and the picaresque preceded and influenced novels of Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Seventeenth-century French romances influenced novels of amorous intrigue by Behn, Manley, and Haywood. These in turn provoked the novel of women’s virtuous resistance created by Richardson. Earlier prose fiction from the Continent was translated into English and widely read throughout the eighteenth century. The transnational traffic in fiction flowed in the other direction as well. Rousseau’s enthusiastic embrace of Richardson popularized the transnational genre of the sentimental novel. From the 1770s onwards German fiction became influential in England, and German-derived tales of terror came to dominate the popular British market.


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