Subject collection: Literary Studies (221 titles, 1971–2015)

These new translations of Bernat Metge’s Libre de Fortuna e Prudència (1381) into Spanish (verse) and English (prose) make this key early work by 14th-century Catalonia’s most challenging writer available to the wider audience it has longed deserved. As with Metge’s masterwork, Lo somni (The Dream), recently translated by Cortijo Ocaña and Elisabeth Lagresa (Benjamins, 2013), the writing of The Book of Fortune and Prudence seems to have been precipitated by a larger crisis in Catalan society, in this case, an all-too-familiar-sounding banking crisis. Drawing on sources ranging from Boethius, to the Roman de la Rose to Arthurian fable, Metge unveils the workings of the world through his two allegorical women, Fortune (good and bad) and Prudence, in a search for consolation in the midst of inexplicable reversals of fortune--those of others, and perhaps his own. But as in the Somni, Metge refuses here to offer pat solutions to the crises of his day, offering what is perhaps one of our earliest glimpses of the impact of new ideas coming from Italy in the Iberian Peninsula. The work is written in the popular noves rimades form (octosyllabic rhymed couplets) in the challenging mix of Occitan and Catalan common to verse writing in 14th century Catalonia. Cortijo’s and Martines’s tri-lingual edition, together with its fine introduction and notes, is an extremely valuable contribution as it makes this unduly neglected text of the later Iberian Middle Ages available for students and other readers in a broadly accessible, yet scholarly, form. (Prof. John Dagenais, UCLA)

This bibliography of semiotic studies covering the years 1975-1985 impressively reveals the world-wide intensification in the field. During this decade, national semiotic societies have been founded allover the world; a great number of international, national, and local semiotic conferences have taken place; the number of periodicals and book series devoted to semiotics has increased as has the number of books and dissertations in the field. This bibliography is the result of a dedicated effort to approach complete coverage.

This volume is a collection of essays on black short stories written between 1998 and 1976. It aims to say something about the black short story as a genre and the development of the racial situation in America as well. The primary aim is to introduce the reader to this long neglected genre of black fiction. In contrast to the black novel, the short story has hardly been given extensive criticism, let alone serious attention. The individual essays of this collection aim at presenting new points of critical orientation in the hope of reviving and fostering further discussions. They provide a variety of approaches, and a great diversity of critical points of view.