Hopes Woven in Smoke: Reimagining Virgil’s Aeneid in Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero

This article investigates Irene Vallejo’s 2015 novel El silbido del arquero, a narrative in the Virgilian tradition mostly inspired by Book IV of the Aeneid. We show how Vallejo reinterprets Dido and Aeneas’s tragic love story by foregrounding minor characters, developing the setting, integrating popular subgenres and exploring communicative anxieties and gender issues. It is argued that patterns of dissatisfaction, self-delusion and disillusionment with human affairs ultimately collide with a message of hope voiced by the fictionalised Virgil.

The Aesthetics of the Human Beast: A Comparative Study of Zola’s L’Assommoir, Galdós’ La Desheredada and Crane’s Maggie

The concept of the human beast is assigned to the French novelist, Émile Zola, who is the first to codify principles of Naturalism, against which all future naturalist works would be compared. In his novels, especially in the saga Les Rougon-Macquart, the human beast, «la bête humaine», appears as a literary character embedded in the lower social strata, who, due to harsh working and living conditions in the French capital during the Second Empire, acts according to its most basic instincts. The actions of a human beast are violent and brutal and its behavior conditioned by limited education. In his novels, Zola applies the doctrines of biological determinism as well as the laws of heredity attained from scientific readings that were very popular among the intellectuals of the period. However, the theoretical principles recollected in Le roman expérimental (G. Charpentier et Cie Éditeurs, 1880) were not equally applied in other countries due to different literary precedents as well as diverse socio-historical and philosophical backgrounds. This paper aims to examine the nuances in the aesthetic representation of the human beast in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Galdós’ La Desheredada (1881) and Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1843), delving into the behavioral patterns which shape the unique characteristics of their human beasts.

Magic as Technological Dominion: John Dee’s Hydragogy and the Draining of the Fens in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass

This paper explores the ambiguous role of magic in the controversy over the draining of the fens, the last bastion of wilderness in seventeenth-century England. In what now looks like an early form of environmentalist resistance to the destruction of these wetlands, opponents of the drainage accused the undertakers of invoking diabolical aid in their audacious efforts to tamper with God’s creation. Evidence of this mentality can be found in both William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass. Via a close reading of Jonson’s comedy, this paper navigates the confluence of magic, technology, and “projection” in the ideological debate surrounding the fens. Just as the traditional Vice figures (Iniquity and Pug) find themselves out-devilled by Jacobean Londoners, the play dramatizes the appropriation and displacement of a residual poetics of enchantment by the emergent discourses of economics and applied engineering. A tendency to equate magic with hydro-engineering technology may have been encouraged by John Dee’s involvement in the project. Drawing on an unpublished manuscript in the Ashmole collection at the Bodleian Library, this paper seeks to uncover the extent and impact of Dee’s role in the drainage. Advocates of the drainage, however, not only denied any supernatural involvement but also counterattacked by accusing their opponents of credulity and magical thinking. They characterized the native fen-dwellers as superstitious heathens and cast a scathing eye on local folklore depicting the fens as a demon-haunted wasteland. In pro-drainage documents, the proposed draining of the fenlands becomes tantamount to an exorcism, purging the rural backwaters of paganism and witchcraft. Wetlands management will now be conducted through applied engineering rather than magical incantations. A little known Jacobean ballad, “The Powte’s Complaint” (c. 1619) revives these animistic tropes to protest the fen’s destruction. Jonson’s play may explain why this tactic was doomed to fail and why this poem has been forgotten. As the credibility of magic eroded in the mid-seventeenth century, opponents of the drainage instead sought to stir up public resentment against the foreignness of the Dutch under-takers rather than their supposed collusion with supernatural forces. Jonson’s own projection that the drainage was an impossible con (like alchemy) would prove inaccurate. Nevertheless, The Devil is an Ass stands as the one of the most ecologically-engaged texts in the canon of early modern English drama.

Herencia medieval y neologismo en el léxico cromático de textos historiográficos en el siglo de Oro según el Corpus diacrónico del español

The main objective of this investigation is to examine with textual support the use of the vocabulary of color during the Golden Period through the investigation that it is a medieval heritage or a neologism. This chromatic terminology was little used during the thirteenth century and in the following centuries its use is multiplied by the communication needs of a society that demands descriptive information on many social, cultural and economic issues, as happens with historiographic documents. To this end, a quantitative investigation has been designed in three phases: (a) search for chromatic voices that designate six selected colors; (b) determination of the first documentation of this group of voices; and (c) quantitative analysis to find a trend regarding the silver duality. For the search of these empirical references, the Diachronic Corpus of Spanish has been used as a data bank to collect textual examples on the chromatic vocabulary extracted from different historiographic sources. The result is the presentation of 100 terms with their respective empirical testimonies that reflect the continuity of the medieval heritage in the colors white, black and red, while formal neologisms are very frequent for the rest.