Bøger udgivet af University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Depart

Following an introduction to the theory of autobiographical rhetoric, this study centers on the process of fictionalizing the self in Cabrera Infante's La Habana para un infante difunto and Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia y el escribidor. Rosemary Feal examines narrative devices that the self-conscious protagonists employ to translate life into text, and further demonstrates how they create mock autobiographies. The analysis of the autobiographical mode reaches beyond the texts in question, to encompass related forms of storytelling including the picaresque, cinema, soap operas, and erotica, and other works by the authors that are the book's focus.

A detailed reading of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future, this study explores the author's construction of the android woman from two angles: science and art. Marie Lathers shows that the novel is a satire of the era's belief that science would cure the ills of the modern world and redeem the femme fatale. She also exposes Villiers's prescient discussion of technologies that form hybrids of science and art. The only lengthy study of Villiers's novel in English, Lathers's book engages significant thinkers of nineteenth-century French aesthetic, medical, and scientific discourse. Contemporary cultural and feminist criticism, particularly that of Roland Barthes, Mary Ann Doane, and Judith Butler, forms the framework of her analysis.

This book examines Ronsard's participation in the heated paragone debate between poets and painters: the Renaissance contest for superiority in the ranking of the arts that emerged in counterpoint to the parity-centered, pseudo-Horatian principle of ut pictura poesis ("as is painting, so is poetry"). The book explores issues that, despite their importance throughout Ronsard's poetry and the writings of leading paragone theorists such as Leone Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, have remained largely unnoticed. In broadest terms, Roberto Campo investigates the poet's notions about the differences between poems and pictures. More precisely, it examines Ronsard's views on two fundamental preoccupations of the theoretical and practical discussions about the arts during the Renaissance: which mode of expression, word or image, can more accurately and meaningfully represent natural realities and abstract celestial truths; and thus, whose art, the poet's or the painter's, holds the highest station in the hierarchy of human creative endeavor?

In a time when few women in Europe were educated and even fewer spoke out against the status quo, Maria de Zayas (1590-?) published novellas filled with criticism about gender relations. Her best-selling Novelas amorosas (1637) and Desenganos amorosos (1647) explore the pleasures and, more frequently, the perils of sex and marriage. Condemned as lewd, Zayas's work was excised from the literary canon by nineteenth-century scholars. But with the feminist revolution of the 1970s came a renewed interest in her fiction. Zayas's contemporary appeal is easily explained: through graphic images of violence against women and poignant examples of women's exclusion from social justice, she speaks to important issues of our own times.Lisa Vollendorf illuminates this compelling author, using contemporary feminist theory to decipher the nuances of Zayas's complex ideologies. Revealing Zayas as a critical figure in European women's literary history, Vollendorf delineates the strategies and impulses behind early modern feminism.