30 años de La Crónica de Leodegundo: aproximación a la gran saga de la historieta histórica española

RESUMEN: En 1991 vio la fecha de venta al público el inicio de una de las más importantes sagas de la historieta histórica española. Marcada por una palpable consulta de estudios y fuentes históricas, convirtió en su autor, Gaspar Meana, en uno de los mejores y más prolíficos autores de tebeos del género en España. Originalmente, una serie de desatinos a la hora de su comercialización le hizo difícil su difusión en la mayoría del público lector de historieta español que ahora ve una segunda oportunidad gracias a la reedición por una universidad española, garante de la soberbia calidad del título. Pese a que los amantes del género conocen o saben de su existencia, los estudios sobre cómic no han podido sino hacer aproximaciones ligeras a la obra precisamente por su gran extensión. Nuestro estudio pretende recopilar comentarios de la crítica de cómic acerca La Crónica de Leodegundo en el 30.º aniversario de su publicación y profundizar en ella mediante una aproximación al estudio de sus páginas como un documento desde la óptica de la corriente de la Historia de la Cultura Escrita. ABSTRACT: In 1991 the release date to the public saw the beginning of one of the most important sagas of the Spanish historical comic strip. Distinguished by an obvious consultation of studies and historical sources, its author, Gaspar Meana, became one of the best and the most prolific author of comics of the genre in Spain. Originally, a series of mistakes at the time of its commercialization made it difficult for it to be known among the majority of the Spanish comic reading public. Nowadays it sees a second chance thanks to the reprinting by a Spanish university, guarantor of the superb quality of the title. Despite the fact that lovers of the genre know or they are aware of its existence, studies on comics have only been able to make light approaches to the work precisely because of its great extension. Our study aims to compile commentary from comic book critics about La Crónica de Leodegundo on the 30th anniversary of its publication and to deepen it through an approach to the study of its pages as a document from the perspective of the current of the History of Written Culture

A Review of Isaac Oluwole Delano’s Pioneering Works on Yoruba Grammar, Orthography, Lexicography and Cultural Education.

Tis is a reproduction and an improved version of our opening chapter on Selected Works of Chief Isaac O. Delano on Yoruba Language. In it, we reintroduce the seminal works of the legendary writer and language educator, I. O. Delano. Many of these works have become obscure to the reading public due to an apparent lack of intentional publication. Delano, known for his prolific writings, wrote a few books relating to Yoruba language and grammar. Tis segment looks at four major non-fiction works of Chief Isaac O. Delano. For the most part, the segment deals with his efforts on Yoruba language, but to some extent, too, it looks at some additional non-language related writings often embedded in his works on language. For example, in Appendix I of his 1965 book, A Modern Yoruba Grammar, the author provides an array of proverbs and sayings in the language with their English equivalents. In Appendix II, Delano infused two old texts into the book, which comprise of a sermon and an essay on schooling. Clearly, Delano seems to have a penchant for dissemination of relevant cultural education in all his works. Indeed, one could say Yoruba Cultural education has always been apparently one of Delano’s passions as well as hidden agenda in writing his books, and he does so relentlessly. In what follows, we 216 Toyin Falola and Michael Oladejo Afolayan examine the four works in no particular order, although the Modern Grammar is given a relatively more detailed review and summarization. The four books are: A Modern Yoruba Grammar; Àgbékà Ọr̀ ọ̀ Yorùbá: Appropriate Words and Expressions in Yoruba; Conversation in Yoruba and English; and Atúmọ̀Èdè Yorùbá.

“Thief in the Name of Kidd”: Unscrupulous Opportunism and Cheap Print in Late Regency London

William Kidd saw himself as a struggling small publisher of illustrated books operating during the 1830s in a marketplace that favoured large scale firms. His response to his perceived disadvantages was twofold. In seeking to reach a rapidly expanding cohort of leisure-based readers, Kidd deployed aggressive marketing policies that frequently sailed close to the law and generated considerable controversy. He was also less than honest about just who had written or illustrated his books. At the same time, he initiated new genres of relatively cheap illustrated publications based on the recreational interest and habits of an emerging lower middle class and artisan reading public. In particular, he took advantage of the wood engraving as a cheap reprographic medium, and employed highly capable draughtsmen such as Robert Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and George Bonner to illustrate his books and pamphlets. His pocket guides to British seaside resorts, his development of the illustrated reprints known as jeu d’esprit or Facetiae and his packaging up of sayings, mottos and nuggets of information into small format gatherings all show a lively minded and innovative response to the rapidly changing literary marketplace. Kidd’s career suggests both the legally chaotic nature of the literary marketplace and the entrepreneurial opportunities offered to a shrewd if unscrupulous publisher in late Regency London.

Through a Glass Darkly: British Representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Union in the Late-16th and 17th Centuries

The article discusses how post-1569 relations between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were presented in various written materials produced in Britain in the late-16th and 17th centuries. It analyses both the materials produced by and for the court or professional elites, and widely circulating publications (books and newspapers) which were readily available to the general reading public. It argues that there is strong evidence that British readers were aware of the existence of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, although the union itself was rarely presented either accurately or in any detail. They therefore had a very blurred conception of how it functioned in practice, as can be illustrated, for example, by British authors downplaying or simply denying the fact that after the Union of Lublin Lithuania became a constituent part of the Commonwealth with a status equal to that of Poland. Moreover, few writers and editors considered it necessary to provide readers with a proper explanation of the union’s basic ‘rules of engagement’, or any reflections on how it functioned on an organisational level.

Seeing Like a Publicist

Chapter 1, Seeing Like a Publicist, locates the origins of public relations alongside emerging environmental narratives at the beginning of the twentieth century. The United States Forest Service, a federal bureau established during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, represented a vision of nature as resource for development, at odds with the romantic spirit of wilderness preservationists such as John Muir. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot developed sophisticated mechanisms and messages to promote his commitment to a distinctly American culture of nature, qualifying and transforming the character of environmental information to the news-reading public in the process. Pinchot developed foundational concepts and practices of public relations that would leave deep grooves in the American experience of environmentalism.

Postmortem, Elegy, and Genius

This chapter turns to the medical field of pathology, sketching out a new theory of how discursive practices of medicine might be dependent on literary models by examining the history of the postmortem report in relation to the Romantic elegy. It explores a brief moment in the early nineteenth century when medical postmortem reports became widely available to the reading public. Using commemorative responses to the death of John Keats as the central example, but also reading the widely published postmortem reports of the deaths of Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and Ludwig van Beethoven, which afforded readers an unexpected degree of closeness with the metaphorically charged bodies of the departed, the chapter focuses on how the postmortem report provides a protocol for interpreting mortality across a range of memorial genres in medical and literary fields. The postmortem report is shown to adopt certain generic qualities of earlier epitaphs, while later elegies by Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson continue to display the medical genre’s influence. The postmortem report is revealed to participate in a mutual exchange with literary conventions, as it first appropriates generic conventions from epitaphic literature, and then asserts a scientific protocol of taxonomical classification within humanistic discourse. When used in this commemorative field, reading bodily symptomology becomes a hermeneutics of consolation that brings its readers into intimacy with figures of genius.

Roberto Arlt and the Readers of Romance

This essay examines the role of female readership in the work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt. I argue that the conflicted and embodied status of the reading public in Arlt’s work is crystallized in the female (or feminized) reader of romances. Through this figure, the Arltian text reveals the pervasiveness of normative sentimental discourse, and narrates how this discourse circulates, impacts, and is absorbed by the bodies of its readers. These critiques emerge quite clearly in Arlt’s novels, where the author enjoys greater freedom of expression. However, his periodical publications and theater necessarily employ a more oblique critical strategy. Focusing on his aguafuertes, the short story “Eugenio Delmonte y los 1300 novios” and the play Trescientos millones, I show how Arlt interpolates his readers as readers of romance while also enacting a rupture in the boundary between the work and the medium in which it appears, encouraging the reader’s awareness of the influence of those media in her daily life.

Lucidarius in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechia: Types of Reception in the mid-16th to the First Quarter of the 20th Century

The article is focused on the problems of historical typology of the Slavic reception of the translated Lucidarius (Lucidář) in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechia throughout its existence. For the first time, a general overview of Slavic evidences is presented in a generalized way, reflecting various types of perception (positive, negative, and neutral) of the specific literary text and indicating the chronology of each of them. Based on these evidences, their historical interpretation is presented, which consists in identifying two qualitatively different stages in the reception of the text under consideration: emotionally engaged (it can equally manifest itself in a positive or negative attitude) and neutral. The change of these historical stages took place in different Slavic countries within half a century (from the 1850s/60s to the 1920s). This process did not depend on the national characteristics of the functioning of Lucidaria, for example, the number of translations performed or their manuscript copies made, as well as the presence or the absence of a local Slavic printed tradition of this particular text, which significantly influenced the degree of its dissemination and, consequently, the level of acquaintance with it in the reading public.

The Thorny Destiny of the Bessarabian Migrant in Current Prose

In this study the author refers not only to the topic of illegal emigration, particularly to the issue of human trafficking, reflected in the novels written by Liliana Corobca and Stela Branzeanu – two writers from the Republic of Moldova, but also to the way this phenomenon is reflected in the novels of other writers whose protagonists represent the current situation in Bessarabia. The novels do simply offer solutions to the situation in which the characters are, but they tend to make the reading public aware of illegal migration and human trafficking as well as to draw attention to the identity problems in the Republic of Moldova. The authors focus more on the subject and less on the aesthetic finality or on the architecture of the writings, their focus is basically the dialogues, the direct discourse, which is rather journalistic, as well as the simplification of the lexical props, following the desideratum of accessibility and sensitization of the reader.

Textualidad y visualidad en El curioso y sabio Alejandro, fiscal y juez de vidas ajenas de Alonso Jerónimo Salas Barbadillo

RESUMEN: A partir de los avances realizados en los estudios de cultura visual a lo largo de los últimos treinta años, se describen las técnicas ecfrásticas adoptadas por Salas Barbadillo en El curioso y sabio Alejandro, fiscal y juez de vidas ajenas (1634), una colección de seis relatos insertados en un marco narrativo representado por una galería de retratos. Al disponer solamente de los epítomes que describen los personajes retratados, se estudiará cómo las relaciones semánticas que se establecen entre textualidad y visualidad, y los procesos de verbalización visual estimulan la estipulación de un pacto de comunicación y colaboración entre el autor y el público lector. ABSTRACT: Starting from the advances carried out in the visual culture studies over the last thirty years, the article deals with the ecphrastic techniques adopted by Salas Barbadillo in El curioso y sabio Alejandro, fiscal y juez de vidas ajenas (1634), that is a collection of six short stories inserted in a narrative framework represented by a gallery of portraits. Since we only have the epitomes related to the painted characters, this work studies the semantic relationships established between textuality and visuality, and the visual verbalization processes that stimulate the stipulation of a communicative and collaborative pact between the author and the reading public.