SPLASH

Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in the Humanities

Twentieth Century

Pessoa Studies

Fernando Pessoa: irrealidad, escritura y desasosiego

by Diego Giménez

Fernando Pessoa: irrealidad, escritura y desasosiego
  • 196 pp.ISBN 9781912399390
  • Date of Publication: 3 August 2023

El Livro do Desassossego de Fernando Pessoa es un enigma. La obra inacabada, construida a posteriori, ofrece diferentes versiones editoriales y un sinfín de interpretaciones. Este libro presenta una comparación entre las principales ediciones para dar cuenta de la relación de interdependencia que hay entre la escritura en fragmentos con el “todo” que el libro editado representa. De esta forma, se define una tipología del fragmento en la obra para después ahondar en el tipo de relación que hay entre la escritura y la realidad y entre la escritura y la construcción de la identidad. Se sostiene que, en la medida que la obra de Pessoa se define por ser una escritura de lo imposible que anuncia un libro nunca plenamente realizado, por ese motivo no cesa de no escribirse, de no realizarse, de no editarse y de no nominarse.

Diego Giménez es doctor en literatura y pensamiento por la Universidad de Barcelona, con una tesis sobre el Livro do Desassossego. Es licenciado en Filosofía por la UB y tiene un máster en Estudios Literarios de la misma universidad. Ha trabajado en la redacción de LaVanguardia.com y cofundó, en 2008, Revista de Letras. Fue becario de la Fundación Calouste Gulbenkian e investigador en el proyecto financiado por la FCT, «Nenhum Problema tem Solução: Um Arquivo Digital do Livro do Desassossego». Actualmente es investigador postdoctoral en el Centro de Literatura Portuguesa de la Universidad de Coímbra.

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Fernando Pessoa: abordagens

edited by Francesca Pasciolla and Rui Gonçalves Miranda

Fernando Pessoa: abordagens
  • 355 pp.ISBN 9781912399222
  • Date of Publication: 24 March 2021

O nome de Fernando Pessoa dispensa apresentações, sendo amplamente reconhecido e não raramente evocado como um dos grandes nomes da modernidade literária, com a sua obra continuamente estimulando e motivando novas e renovadas leituras. Os autores deste volume, incluindo os editores, estão cientes e reconhecem(-se) (n)os esforços de críticos que antes abordaram e produziram leituras outras do texto pessoano, dentro das respetivas sensibilidades geracionais e culturais, inevitavelmente com os seus partis pris. Mas o leitor acompanhá-los-á na tarefa irresistível, no prazer performativo, de revisitar sempre, uma vez mais, as aberturas da obra e do texto, as linhas e as entrelinhas que convidam a inúmeras partidas sem regresso definido ou mesmo sem garantia de regresso… Com ensaios de: Paulo Borges, Gisele Batista Candido, Mariana Gray de Castro, Sara Costa, Pedro Eiras, Caio Gagliardi, Diego Giménez, Kenneth David Jackson, Kelvin Falcão Klein, Maria Manuel Lisboa, Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, Bernard McGuirk, Rui Gonçalves Miranda, Francesca Pasciolla, Rita Patrício, Flávio Rodrigo Penteado, Nuno Ribeiro, Mark Sabine, Richard Zenith.

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Fernando Pessoa’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Heteronyms

Shakespeare, Fernando Pessoa, e a Invencao dos Heteronimos

by Mariana Gray de Castro

Fernando Pessoa’s
                                                  Shakespeare: The
                                                  Invention of the
                                                  Heteronyms
  • 270 pp. ISBN 978-1-905510-46-7
  • Date of Publication: 11 February 2016
  • (Also available in Portuguese translation)

In this wide-ranging book, Mariana Gray de Castro argues that William Shakespeare was the single most important literary influence at the heart of Fernando Pessoa’s creativity, the invention of the heteronyms. Focusing on Pessoa’s views on Shakespeare’s genius, his apparent invisibility as an author, his possible madness and his ambiguous sexuality, she draws upon Pessoa’s published and unpublished writings on Shakespeare, as well as the marginalia in his Shakespearean books, in order to show how and why Shakespeare is the pervasive underlying presence in the heteronymic universe. In doing so, Castro proposes a new “Shakespearean” interpretation of Pessoa’s heteronyms.

“Like a good literary sleuth, Mariana Gray de Castro has searched for – and discovered – why Fernando Pessoa was so interested in the Shakespeare authorship controversy, in Shakespeare’s genius and possible madness, and in his presumed ‘sexual inversion’, and she shows us what all of this had to do with the creation of the heteronyms. Pessoa, who loved detective stories and wrote a number of his own, would have been pleased.”RICHARD ZENITH

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Portuguese translation

Walt Whitman in Fernando Pessoa

by Francesca Pasciolla

Walt Whitman in
                                                  Fernando Pessoa
  • 132 pp. ISBN 978-1-905510-49-8
  • Date of Publication: 14 November 2016

This volume explores the dynamics that connect two of the most celebrated poets and intriguing literary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Walt Whitman and Fernando Pessoa. It focuses in particular on the role of the Portuguese Pessoa as reader of the North American writer, on the lessons he took from Leaves of Grass and, finally, on his reworking of Whitman’s legacy. Whether characterized by a metaphor from chemistry (catalyst) or psychology (liberator), what is certain is that Whitman represented for the Portuguese poet a breach in his own writing practice, opening up a further plurality and an extended performance of the textual expression of the Real. Pessoa found in the verses of Leaves of Grass an encouragement to transcend his own limits and to embark upon a dramatic poetics, the most notable feature of which is perhaps heteronymy – his so-called drama em gente. It is legitimate, therefore, to think of the experimental dramatization in poetry undertaken by Pessoa as a challenging multiplicity of voicings and, as a consequence, for the reader, a reminder of the unrealizability of any critical synthesis.

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The Apocalypse according to Fernando Pessoa and Ofélia Queirós
in a parallel Portuguese/English text

by Paulo Borges

The Apocalypse
                                                  according to
                                                  Fernando Pessoa
                                                  and Ofélia Queirós
                                                  in a parallel
                                                  Portuguese/English
                                                  text
  • 129 pp. ISBN 978-1-912399-07-9
  • Date of Publication: 29 April 2019
‘Ghost busting and myth breaking may arise from a fascination with the paranormal… or the paranoid. Pessoa acolytes without number have pursued obsessively the phantasms of not only an iconic Fernando but also of “his” Ophelia. A corrective swerve is here proposed – “É a Hora!” and about time, too – by the eminent philosopher and political thinker Paulo Borges. For the author of this horizon-shifting play is a critic profoundly immersed in the Tagus of Fernando Pessoa’s writing yet an unerring navigator returned to the healthy air and solidity of the riverbank of a different, albeit apocalyptic vision. At the historically anchored Cais das Colunas, an imaginary Lisbon quayside encounter of the lionized poet and his supposed one true love is performed through theatre, music and dance, interlaced with hardly paralleled and pervasively knowledgeable literary citation. Dedicated Pessoans and curious onlookers alike will marvel at the light-touch erudition and the cunningly subversive wit of a specialist able to rise above mere literary criticism to produce and to stage an iconoclastic projection, here in the original Portuguese and in a first English translation, of “Um Outro P…….”. Another Portugal? Another Pessoa? Certainly, a rivetingly other Performance.’BERNARD McGUIRK

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Personal Infinitive: Inflecting Fernando Pessoa

by Rui Gonçalves Miranda

Personal Infinitive:
                                                  Inflecting Fernando
                                                  Pessoa
  • 213pp. ISBN 978-1-905510-23-8
  • Date of Publication: 28 April 2017

To state that the writings of Fernando Pessoa anticipate deconstruction is to draw attention to what is always already waiting to happen in his texts. The unfinished is a requisite that each reading may elicit and highlight as it strives to curve, to bend, to open up again, to inflect, the writings that have beguiled so easily those of his many critics determined on and by interpretative closure.

The meanings in and of Pessoa’s works cannot be restricted by any putative subjection of the text and textuality to a theory, a presence, or disciplinary outlook. This study proposes multiple openings, readings which unapologetically pursue an implicit dialogue between critical thinking and literary performance; between a close reading of texts signed by Fernando Pessoa and a focus on the language structuring closely-woven critical and literary discourses.

Not least, the manifestation of different and differential textual subjectivities (a. k. a. “heteronyms”) is shown to be underwritten and simultaneously undermined by the writing(s) of and under the signature “Fernando Pessoa”.

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The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict

Tortas Fritas de Polenta

by Adolfo Buyúgar and Ariel Martinelli

Tortas Fritas de Polenta
  • 100 pp. ISBN 9781912399208
  • Date of Publication: 2 April 2023

Esta es una extraordinaria novela gráfica que relata la verídica experiencia de guerra de un joven soldado argentino.

La enérgica representación de eventos aterradores se presenta en dramática monocromía, despojada de detalles distrayentes y enfatizando expresiones faciales, el diálogo entrecortado y los efectos sonoros, al mismo tiempo que rechaza justificar o dulcificar los extremos propios de la guerra o los del desempeño de aquellos capturados en la acción.

El lector no pasa de detalles perturbadores, ya sean estos funciones corporales, anhelos, miedos, o el odio de los jóvenes reclutas hacia el enemigo y -a veces- hacia sus propios oficiales. Los gráficos severos muestran una tierra desolada y sin árboles, de suelo pedregoso y montañas imponentes al tiempo que, en los días cada vez más breves de un invierno petrificante, la acción y el diálogo transmiten el horror cada vez más profundo del conflicto armado.

“Una obra que es, al mismo tiempo, creación y documento, invención y testimonio. En ese sentido, es historia de las dos, de la que se escribe con mayúsculas y de la que se escribe con minúsculas. Y en esa conjunción encuentra originalidad, compromiso y belleza.”Antonio Altarriba, autor de El arte de volar

Ver vídeo de 3 minutos: Ariel Martinelli en conversación con Adolfo Bayúgar

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Fried Polenta Scones

by Adolfo Buyúgar and Ariel Martinelli
translated by Leandro Paolino Somers

Fried Polenta Scones
  • 100 pp. ISBN 9781912399376
  • Date of Publication: 2 April 2023

This is an extraordinary graphic novel recounting the true story of one young Argentine soldier’s experience of war.

Its visceral depiction of terrifying events is presented in dramatic monochrome, stripped of distracting detail, giving emphasis to facial expression, staccato dialogue and sonorous effects, together with a refusal to excuse or sugar-coat the extremes of warfare or of the behaviour of those caught up in the turmoil.

The reader is spared no disturbing details, be they bodily functions, desires, fear, the young conscripts’ hatred of the enemy and sometimes of their own officers. The stark graphics delineate a bleak treeless land with stony terrain and forbidding mountains while, in the shortening days of a petrifying winter, the action and dialogue transmit the deepening horror of armed conflict.

“In twenty years of reading the testimonies, from both sides, of the harrowing experiences of survivors of the 1982 war, rarely have I encountered a text more directly capturing the irresponsibility, the futility, of exposing ill-equipped young conscripts to peril, trauma and the unrelenting proximity of violent death as depicted in Fried Polenta Scones.”Bernard McGuirk, author of Falklands-Malvinas: An Unfinished Business

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Gurkhas, Falklands and Leadership

by Mike Seear

Gurkhas, Falklands and Leadership
  • 420 pp. ISBN 9781905510726
  • Date of Publication: 29 March 2022

Written by a combat veteran of the 1982 South Atlantic war, this book completes Mike Seear’s trilogy on the subject. “The Gurkha Stone” unveiling on East Falkland in April 2019 also formally marked, at last, the 1st Battalion, 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles participation in Operation Corporate. Much effort has been devoted to accessing primary and secondary sources of information. These include previously unpublished experiences of combatants representing the Brigade of Gurkhas, their Argentine opponents and a Scots Guardsman. The result is a forensic and realistically jarring story in which effective leadership in an artillery-dominated battlefield environment was a decisive factor for final success.

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1905510721

Gurkhas, Malvinas y Liderazgo

by Mike Seear, translated by Diego F. García Quiroga

Gurkhas, Malvinas y Liderazgo
  • 449 pp. ISBN 9781905510757
  • Date of Publication: 2 May 2023

Con este libro, Mike Seear, veterano de combate de la guerra del Atlántico Sur de 1982, completa su trilogía de sobre el tema. La inauguración de ‘La Piedra Gurkha’ en Isla Soledad en abril de 2019 también marcó final y formalmente, la participación del 1er Batallón, 7o Rifles Gurkha del Duque de Edimburgo en la Operación Corporate. Mucho esfuerzo se dedicó para acceder a fuentes primarias y secundarias de información. Estas incluyen relatos inéditos de combatientes que representan a la Brigada de Gurkhas, sus oponentes argentinos y un miembro de la Guardia Escocesa. El resultado es una historia realista, forense y sorprendente en la que el liderazgo eficaz fue un factor decisivo para el éxito final en el entorno de un campo de batalla dominado por la artillería.

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The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict: A Reader

edited by Macdonald Daly

The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict: A Reader
  • 294 pp. ISBN 9781912399321
  • Date of Publication: 1 March 2022

The Falklands-Malvinas War of 1982 ended hundreds of British and Argentine lives on the Islands, many of them very young, and definitively contributed to the later deaths of many ex-combatants. It ruined or adversely affected the lives of many thousands more survivors and military relatives. It put a stop to the patient diplomacy which had preceded it, and resoundingly consolidated the popular appeal of the UK Thatcher government, thus helping to ensure the dominance of right-wing Conservative administrations in the UK for another fifteen years. In Argentina, it contributed to the downfall of a terroristic dictatorship and gave the country a chance to follow a less frightening democratic path. It galvanized more serious and concerted efforts to address the problems of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and led to the creation of new model networks for veteran peer support. Neither side really won anything concrete by means of it, although the residents of the Islands themselves undoubtedly gained in military security, financial subsidy and political attention. Otherwise it is largely a sad tale of loss, grief, suffering and waste.

This Reader selects, forty years after the War, some of the most vital writing about it. It tends, without partisanship, towards evaluating the War in moral and political, humane and socially consequential terms, of the kind with which military historians and short-term-perspective politicians tend not to concern themselves. It likewise inclines towards remembering the War as an event in which identifiable individuals, or their friends and comrades, suffered and died, rather than simply viewing these many participants as anonymous pawns on a geopolitical chess board. While providing general factual commentary and discussion on the causes, events, consequences of and continuing debate about the War, it additionally gives considerable space to accounts of what it was like, experientially, to have been a combatant on either side in the conflict. It also takes into consideration the ways in which the War has been mediated in news, literature, film and television. The anthology therefore represents the variety of discourses to be found in the existing archive of writing about the dispute, encompassing diplomatic communications, historical accounts, personal memoirs, impassioned polemics and academic analyses originating in various disciplines.

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South 1982

by ADRIÁN N. BRAVI
translated from the Italian by RICHARD DIXON

South 1982
  • 129 pp. ISBN 9781910858233
  • Date of publication: 2 March 2022

1982: Argentina is in crisis. In the face of protests, the military junta calls a generation to arms in the hope that patriotic feeling, and a quick and easy war, will restore national unity.

Adrián N. Bravi recounts the battle for the Malvinas Islands through the story of Alberto Adorno, a young soldier for whom the tragedy of an absurd conflict turns into comedy. South 1982 portrays the feelings of someone waiting to leave the army, of someone not long recruited who is about to return home but feels he is still at war, who wanders around the camp with a book of poetry in his pocket.

Bravi narrates the events of one war, which is the story of every war, through the ironic voice of a modern Soldier Švejk.

“With the skill of a spider, Bravi weaves stories that seem transparent, of agreeable humour, into which readers fall like flies, discovering that, at the centre of the plot, there’s a fierce, formidable writer.”Alberto Manguel

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Hors de Combat: The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect

edited by Mike Seear and Diego F. García Quiroga

Hors de Combat:
                                                  The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict
                                                  in Retrospect
  • 210 pp. ISBN 9781905510252
  • Date of Publication: 1 June 2009

This is a revised and expanded version of the book first published in 2007.

Hors de Combat: The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict in Retrospect brings together contributions from the University of Nottingham's 2006 International Colloquium, The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict Twenty-Five Years On. The initiative to hold such an historic event led to the coming together for the first time since the 1982 War of ex- combatants from both sides, in dialogue with specialist historians, media sociologists, lawyers, literary critics and psychiatrists, as well as with veterans of other wars.

Their contributions, edited by Diego F. García Quiroga and Mike Seear, who themselves served in the War, are published here as a written record of what, for many, had been a unique moment of peace and reconciliation.

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The Malvinas Question

by Uriel Erlich, with a Foreword by Daniel Filmus

The Malvinas Question
  • 108 pp. ISBN 9781912399239
  • Date of Publication: 14 March 2021
“This is a book full of voices in dialogue. Uriel Erlich has chosen to bring together a notably varied forum of protagonists, allowing each and all to express themselves effectively, ranging from the opinions of statesmen, those responsible for some stage of the negotiating processes in respect of the 'Malvinas Question', to the views of political analysts. All are originally and tellingly interspersed with the life stories of men and women whose personal histories are traversed by these delicate considerations. Usually such viewpoints are dissociated: whoever deals with 'the central' habitually ignores 'the peripheral'; the story is as often viewed 'from above' or 'from below'. This version consists of a scholarly analysis set amidst a choral narrative of multiple registers. It is a most effective way to address an ever-complex topic that does not start or end in a war, absurd or glorious. It necessarily frames the 'Malvinas Question' as a political issue, subject to bilateral debate yet only understandable in the broader context of international affairs. The purpose of the book, to address the development of official Argentine foreign policy on what again emerges as a yet unresolved matter, inseparable from the airing of internal voices intertwined in a plural and complex account, is thoroughly accomplished.”Marcelo Vernet Great-great-grandson of Luis Vernet, first Military Commander of the Malvinas Islands

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Media Stories in the Falklands-Malvinas Conflict

by Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel

Media Stories
                                                  in the
                                                  Falklands-Malvinas
                                                  Conflict
  • 170 pp. ISBN 9781905510443
  • Date of Publication: 1 October 2014

From the Foreword, by Umberto Eco:

“Here is yet another effect of fog, this time provided directly by readers in order to sustain the necessary suspense of the story. We seem to be halfway between Flatland and Antonioni's Blow Up. Argentine newspapers were obliged to find another narrative genre, shifting from war movies to spy novels. Who invented the Yellow Submarine? The British secret services, in order to lower the spirits of Argentines? The Argentine military command, in order to justify its tough stance? The British press? The Argentine press? Who benefited from the rumour? The Yellow Submarine was posited by the media, and as soon as it was posited everyone took it for granted. What happens when in a fictional text the author posits, as an element of the actual world (which is the background of the fictional one) something that does not obtain in the actual world?”

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Return to Tumbledown: The Falklands-Malvinas War Revisited

by Mike Seear

Return to
                                                  Tumbledown: The
                                                  Falklands-Malvinas War
                                                  Revisited
  • 584 pp. ISBN 9781905510399
  • Date of Publication: 10 June 2012

Mike Seear, who served in the British army during the Falklands-Malvinas conflict, undertakes an epic narrative of the War, in what is at once a remarkable personal testimony and a grand-scale history told from both sides, with dozens of photographs (most reproduced in full colour in the Kindle edition).

“Remarkable and unprecedented access to Argentine first-hand sources and participants is balanced by a scrupulous concern for evoking contemporary and subsequent British and Islander witness, testimony and recollection.”BERNARD McGUIRK, AUTHOR OF FALKLANDS-
MALVINAS: AN UNFINISHED BUSINESS

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Letting Go: Stories of the Falklands-Malvinas War

by Diego García Quiroga

Letting Go: Stories
                                                  of the Falklands-Malvinas War
  • 239 pp. ISBN 9781910858073
  • Date of Publication: 2 April 2016

Letting Go is a series of interconnected stories based on the author’s experiences as a naval officer in Argentina. It is also an invitation to contemplate the possibility of a peaceful solution for the conflict over the Falklands-Malvinas islands. Moreover, it is an effort to portray the “Malvinas experience” from different points of view and to register the attitude of some of its participants. The book adroitly conveys the atmosphere of relative isolation, confusion and hope that coloured the violent and chaotic life of Argentines during the 1970s and 1980s and offers an insight into the close connections that can be drawn between the country’s struggle against terrorism and the war for the Malvinas-Falklands. First published in Buenos Aires in 2010, the book was hailed by Rosendo Fraga, a leading political commentator, as “picturing Argentina with its drama, its decline and its recent conflicts […] written with agility, swiftness and intensity”.

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Collected Writings of Bernard McGuirk

To mark the elevation to the title of Professor Emeritus of Bernard McGuirk, distinguished holder of the Chair of Romance Literatures and Literary Theory at the University of Nottingham, SPLASH Editions publishes a series of his collected writings.

Erasing Fernando Pessoa

Erasing
                                                  Fernando Pessoa
  • 129 pp (large format). ISBN 9781912399055
  • Date of Publication: 20 February 2017

The present selection prompts acknowledgement of the input of and the interplay with generations of those who, having opted to approach comparative literatures in the Romance languages, happily arrive at texts habitually unseen, poems to be read and evaluated in the first instance without attribution to author but within a prevailing critical climate of applicable analytical discourses whereby the poetry will remain ever to be revisited, the readings ever to be refreshed, analyses ever to be indulged, enjoyed, whilst ever returning, deferring, to the host text. How is this poem to be read? How does this particular poem invite, allow, a given reading? Will a broad spectrum of approaches be recognized and respected? In the exponential international realm of Pessoa studies, there is, and will be, assuredly, room for all; with a proviso which this volume articulates.

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Latin American Literature and Post-structuralism

Latin
                                                  American
                                                  Literature
                                                  and Post-structuralism
  • 279pp. ISBN 9781912399048
  • Date of Publication: 16 October 2018

Critical theory meets Latin American fiction and poetry in this challenging analysis of literature and literary criticism through the agencies of post-structuralism. A reminder that deconstructions cannot occur spontaneously, it highlights the confrontation between theory, politics and literature. The use of literary theory never as a circumscribed field, never as an alternative to literary study, but built ever instrumentally into critical practice, may ensure that one’s own reading, each and every time, will be rendered, soon, unreadable, a deconstructed, displaced authority. If there appears to be an inexorable shift towards a preoccupation with the role of an ethics in deconstructive discursiveness this book suggests that the enterprises of post- structuralism and post-Marxism are not, by any means necessarily, at odds.

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Is there a Latin American Text in this Class?

Is there a Latin American Text in this Class?
  • 294pp. ISBN 9781912399154
  • Date of Publication: 4 February 2021

Is there a Latin American Text in this Class?, companion volume to Latin American Literature and Post-Structuralism (2018), addresses some two decades of the interaction of deconstruction and the so-called cultural turn in literary studies. Again and here with a pronounced pedagogical inflection, critical theory meets Latin American fiction and poetry in a challenging analysis of literature and literary criticism through the agencies of post-structuralism. A further reminder that deconstructions cannot occur spontaneously, the book highlights confrontations between theory, politics and literature at and across linguistic and cultural frontiers.

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Falklands-Malvinas: An Unfinished Business

Falklands-Malvinas: An
                                                  Unfinished
                                                  Business
  • 382pp. ISBN 9781912399062
  • Date of Publication: 14 November 2018

This book analyses fiction, poetry, song, drama and film that deal directly with the Falklands-Malvinas conflict. In Argentina and in the United Kingdom, cultural historians and literary critics have occasionally addressed and sought to account for the impact of the 1982 war on the creative, imaginative and artistic output of their respective cultures. Habitually, they have done so in isolation or, at best, with cursory cross-referencing to “the other side”. This study looks beyond national frontiers to consider not just the so-called Falklands- Malvinas factor in politics but the conflict's multiple effects in literature and the arts worldwide.

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Valley of the Fallen: The (N)ever Changing Face of General Franco’s Monument

by Gareth Stockey

Valley of the Fallen: The (N)ever Changing Face of
                                                  General Franco’s Monument
  • 109 pp. ISBN 9781602710269
  • Date of Publication: 1 December 2013

Perhaps the most notorious symbolic and material expression of the bitter "memory wars" that have gripped Spain in recent years is a monument which remains one of the country's most popular tourist sites, El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen). It was erected by the Franco regime in the aftermath of the civil war "to defy time and oblivion" and commemorate Franco's victory. It also became the resting place of the dictator himself after 1975, and a site of nostalgic homage for those groups and individuals who remained supportive of the regime after the transition to democracy in Spain.

This book examines the ongoing controversies over The Valley of the Fallen and its place within the wider memory wars. It demonstrates that the monument was intended as a site of triumphalist Francoist memory, and a means of further dividing the nation between victors and vanquished in the aftermath of civil war. The book treats The Valley of the Fallen as an historical source in its own right, contextualising the cultural universe in which the monument was constructed, and within which visitors were expected to read its message since it was opened to the public in 1959. Finally, the book examines some of the ways in which the meaning and purpose of The Valley of the Fallen have been (deliberately) obscured in order to respond to criticism from both inside and outside Spain.

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Uma didática da invenção: Re-envisioning the material world in the poetry of Manoel de Barros

by David Smith

Uma didática da invenção: Re-envisioning the material world
                                                  in the poetry of Manoel de Barros
  • 204 pp. ISBN 9781912399017
  • Date of Publication: 22 May 2018

Manoel de Barros is often characterized as the poet laureate of the Pantanal wetlands, a voice of Brazil’s wilderness landscapes as counterpoint to the city- based modernismo. But this narrow characterization robs Barros’s work of the profound and universal insight which it so often achieves, demonstrating new ways of imagining the relationship between the human and the non-human, and delivering a timely and some would say urgently necessary reassessment of our role and place in the world. This book examines Barros’s work in a global context, engaging with the emerging field of ecological literary criticism (or eco-criticism) and arguing that Barros can be seen not merely as a poet to whom such a critique can be applied, but as an innovator and creator in this critical sphere, often long before academic work caught up with such radical readings of the material world. Not part of the São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro literary scenes, Barros is not particularly well known outside of Brazil, but in a world in which the effects of our actions on our planet are ever more vivid, and the need for radical thought and action ever more pressing, never has his incisive verse been more relevant.

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