Classics, Medieval & Renaissance 2012 - University of Toronto ...

LITERATURE
Forgetful Muses
Reading the Author in the Text
Ian Lancashire
With research featured in The New York Times
Magazine’s Ninth Annual Year in Ideas
How can we understand and analyse the primarily
unconscious process of writing In this groundbreaking
work of neuro-cognitive literary theory,
Ian Lancashire maps the interplay of self-conscious
critique and unconscious creativity.
Drawing on author testimony, cybernetics, cognitive
psychology, corpus linguistics, text analysis, the
neurobiology of mental aging, and his own experiences,
Lancashire’s close readings of twelve authors, including
Caedmon, Chaucer, Coleridge, Joyce, Christie, and
Atwood, serve to illuminate a mystery we all share.
Ian Lancashire is a professor in the Department of
English at the University of Toronto.
‘Forgetful Muses is filled with a wealth of materials
and exhibits an impressively high standard of scholarship
– it’s a demanding read, but also highly rewarding.’
Raine Koskimaa, University of Jyväskylä
360 pp / 18 illustrations; 24 tables / 6 x 9 / 2010
Cloth 978-1-4426-4093-1 $65.00 (£45.99)
SPANISH
NEW
Objects of Culture
in the Literature of Imperial Spain
NEW
edited by
Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas
Objects of Culture in the Literature
of Imperial Spain
Edited by Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas
Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was
a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats
in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant
hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a
token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the
Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers
of the period shared the same impulse to collect,
arrange, and display objects, though in imagined
settings, as literary artefacts.
These essays examine a variety of cultural objects
described or alluded to in books from the Golden
Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings,
tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of
war, and even enchanted bronze heads. The contributors
emphasize how literature preserved and transformed
objects to endow them with new meaning
for aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes
– whether to perpetuate certain habits of thought
and belief, or to challenge accepted social and moral
norms.
Mary E. Barnard is associate professor of Spanish
and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania
State University. Frederick A. de Armas is the Andrew
W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in the
Humanities, Spanish Literature, and Comparative
Literature at the University of Chicago.
(Toronto Iberic)
Approx. 336 pp / 14 illustrations / 6 x 9 / December 2012
Cloth 978-1-4426-4512-7 $75.00 (£52.99)
Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Susan Byrne
Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote is a deep
consideration of the intellectual environment that
gave rise to Cervantes’ seminal work. Susan Byrne
demonstrates how Cervantes synthesized the debates
surrounding the two most authoritative discourses
of his era – those of law and history – into a new
aesthetic product, the modern novel.
Byrne uncovers the empirical underpinnings of
Don Quixote through a close philological study of
Cervantes’ sly questioning of and commentary on
these fields. As she skilfully demonstrates, while
sixteenth-century historiographers and jurists across
southern Europe sought the philosophical nexus of
their fields, Cervantes created one through the
adventures of a protagonist whose history is all about
justice. As such, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don
Quixote illustrates how Cervantes’ art highlighted
the inconsistencies of juridical-historical texts and
practice, as well as anticipated the ultimate resolution
of their paradoxes.
Susan Byrne is an assistant professor in the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University.
(Toronto Iberic)
Approx. 248 pp / 8 illustrations / 6 x 9 / October 2012
Cloth 978-1-4426-4527-1 $55.00 (£38.99)
28 University of Toronto Press