Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages (vols. 1–42, 1980–1992)

Lorca's poetry is founded upon a complex symbolical system of recurring motifs. This book analyses a number of those motifs as poetic signs through a contextual reading of Libro de poemas (1921) and Diván del Tamarit (1940) as the initial and final stages of Lorca's career. The sexual and religious crisis voiced in Libro de poemas achieves poetic articulation through the sign of the star, while the betrayal of childhood's fairytale is evidenced in the sign of the moon. Diván del Tamarit exemplifies the trancelike writing of the poetry of “opening up one's veins” as an activity developing between the desire for a word that will capture plenitude and the word's impenetrability to fix an impulse that, in itself, resists any determinacy.

Israel Pelletier argues that Trois contes demands a different kind of reading which distinguishes it from Madame Bovary and other Flaubert texts. By the time he wrote this late work, Flaubert's attitude toward his characters and the role of fiction had changed to accommodate different social, political, and literary pressures. He constructed two opposing levels of meaning for each of the stories, straight and ironic, which produced a more fruitful way of addressing some of his concerns and assumptions about langauge and illusion. Included in this study are a provocative feminist reading of Un Coeur, an assessment of Saint Julien as Flaubert's attempt to come to terms with his originality as a writer, and an interpretation of Hérodias as an autobiography of the writing process.

In this brilliant overview of parodic praxis in the Spanish-American novel during the years 1960-1985, Elzbieta Skłodowska examines several aspects of parody: its role in the renovation of anachronistic forms of discourse (mock-epic) and the re-writing of the canon of the historical novel; its function in transgressing literary formulas (detective novel); its subversive quality in the counter-discourse of women writers; and the relation between parody, satire, irony, humor, and metafiction. This sound analysis of some twenty-five novels, carefully illustrated by works little treated in critical discourse, takes as its theoretical basis the works of the Russian Formalists and Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody.

This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Météores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyère and Le Médianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.

Amadei-Pulice examines the conflict between Lope's dramatic formula (comedia) and the new polytechnic formula that in the hands of Calderon merged dramatic poetry with visual and auditory effects (comedia de teatro). The author places the Spanish baroque theater within the wider context of a revolution in the theory of representation, signs, and meanings that took place at the beginning of the seventeenth century and marked the appearance of a new dramatic style: the stile rappresentativo. Special attention is given to the techniques and applications of perspectival scenery, stagecraft, optics, and the creation of visual and sound effects contributed by the Florentine melodramma. The highlighting of Italian dramatic theory and practice reveals that Calderon was an innovator and creator of a new concept in theater.

Criticism of La Regenta has until recently focused on the text's plot as an extraordinarily coherent and convincing fictional world. Stephanie A. Sieburth demonstrates that the devices which produce order in the text are counterbalanced by an equally strong tendency toward entropy of meaning. The narrator is shown to be duplicitous and unreliable in his judgments on characters and events. Without an omniscient narrator, readers must interpret for themselves the complex intertextual structure of the novel. Saints' lives, honor plays, and serial novels each provide partial reflections of Ana Ozores' story. The text becomes a collage of mutually reflecting segments which, like Ana in her moments of self-doubt and madness, ultimately question the function of language and of any overriding interpretation or meaning.

Margitic's critical edition of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid (1637) provides scholar and student with a complete, accurate resource for the study of this famous play. The original text is reproduced, with subsequent variants indicated in footnotes. The book begins with an introduction which examines the play's genesis, sources, successive modifications, critical reception, and stage fortune as well as thematic and dramatic structure, and concludes with a bibliography. Three appendices contain texts contemporary with Le Cid which comment on the work. The first two include Corneille's comments on his masterpiece and his list of Spanish sources (accompanied by French translations). The final appendix presents a selection of particularly important documents that formed part of the Querelle du Cid. All the texts are amply but not excessively annotated. A comprehensive glossary follows the appendices.

This study views the pervasive ambiguity of Chretien's romances as a positive quality and focuses on the techniques used in Yvain to encourage reflection. An adversative structure informs this romance, setting up a disconcerting rhythm of false belief and reversal which forces the reader/listener (like the hero) to question all that meets the eyes and ears. Grimbert's discussion ranges broadly and authoritatively over subjects from narrative omniscience and reliability ... to character, to rhetoric and the duplicity of language”. Norris J. Lacy, French Review 63.2 (1989).

In both the real and the symbolic sense, the action of the Liaisons is writing letters, which is to say, giving the phrase an ontological twist, that writing is its own subject. Letters in an epistolary novel recount and reenact simultaneously, without distinction. Doing and telling are congruent, interchangeable, identical activities. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are the principal characters in this novel because they know best how to use the word. They control and direct others through their writing. From our perspective, however, to listen well is an even more critical and fundamental activity than writing well. The ultimate victor in this novel of seduction and deception is not necessarily the one who writes best but rather he, or she, who reads best. Concentrating on the reader places the entire epistolary exchange in a new light and accentuates the use of the word as an instrument of power and the letter as a tool for domination.