Literature, Romance

Like most nineteenth-century French realists, Maupassant's interest in positivistic models of the human being, from Darwinian evolution to the new psychologies, led him to scientific readings, detailed documentations of "milieu," and contemporary subjects which he then treated with literary techniques drawn from both the realist Flaubert and the naturalist Zola. It is in extending these techniques to the fantastic, however, that Maupassant achieves an original and highly effective amalgam best characterized as "Le Naturalisme fantastique."

The traditional, realist, dramatic concept of coherent character identity is ruptured by the two plays Les Chevaliers de la table ronde and El publico. Cocteau's and Lorca's works, which are usually labeled as surrealist due to their apparently disjointed nature, are actually embodiments of the poet-playwrights' continuing attempts to reveal that identity, including gendered identity, is a performance. The metadramatic elements of the plays such as discourse, costumes and gender are unstable and voluntarily changeable; they have repercussions beyond the proscenium. Cocteau and Lorca invite their audiences to consider the performative nature of their identities.

The "cuckold" is the prototype of the consenting husband in Quevedo's time. He represents the hypocrisy, the vanity, and, most of all, the moral decadence of Spanish society in the 17th Century. Quevedo expresses his great disillusion with the amoral behavior of his people and, through his satire, attempts to give a lesson on morality. Quevedo was able to transfer onto his work Spanish ideas and realities, giving them a serious character as that of an ascetic or a politician, with the pessimistic and sarcastic tone typical of his satire. Two important and influencing factors on his work and his way of looking at life were the family and cultural environment he was exposed to and the effect of his physical defects, which he succeeded in compensating due to his energetic personality. Quevedo used conceptism as his literary style, applying his genius to the creation of metaphors, taking the Spanish language to its maximum expression as no one else had done before him.

Les Mouches is a modern reconstruction of the ancient myth embodied in the The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Jean-Paul Sartre not only rewrote the legend of Orestes; he remodeled it. Orestes is not just a new man; he is his own man. The play, therefore, is not a mere pastiche in modern dress. Sartre infuses Orestes with an unprecendented "Existentialist" consciousness, and this transformation adds new complexities to the ancient text. This Existentialist reworking of Hellenistic images is distinguished from the classically "tragic" elements in Aeschylus as well as later modifications in Sophocles and Euripides. Sartre's early introduction into the lore of Hellenism is considered, and a discussion of Sartre's theoretical and philosophical perspective on theater suggests which Greek elements Sartre was disposed to incorporate into his script.

De Beauvoir's Existentialist works , primarily Pour une
morale de l'ambiguite and Existentialisme et la sagesse
des nations, and her feminist work Le Deuxieme sexe,
affirm that women are fully as capable of attaining
Existentialist authenticity and liberty as men. The
novels, however, portray women who often fail the
Existentialist ideal, and always fail the feminist ideal.
Indeed the major novels, including L'Invitee, Le Sang
des autres, Les Mandarins, suggest an almost inverse
relationship between feminist convictions and personal
success. Having chosen not to depict female characters
as social activists or revolutionaries but as women in
love, de Beauvoir presents unhappy lovers unable to
achieve independence from the dominant male. In accord
with Existentialist precepts of realism, De Beauvoir's
fiction illustrates not her feminist ideal hut her view
of women's contemporary condition.

In 1903 Emile Fabre, consummate theater technician, presented his adaption of Balzac's La Rabouilleuse at the Odeon Theater in Paris. The novel appealed to Fabre's naturalist interest in the worlds of family and finance, and Fabre based the action on the intense conflict among three characters for the inheritance of a dim-witted old man. Fabre amplified Balzac's theme of of the debilitating effects of money on families, and on society at large. This vying for inheritance becomes not only a game played for high stakes, but also a life-and-death struggle among beasts of prey. many of the alterations that Fabre made in adapting the novel into a play were necessitated by the change of literary genre, as in eliminating characters or creating composite figures. Many of the additions were made for purely theatrical reasons, enabling Fabre to present his money theme while, at the same time, holding his audience's interest until the final curtain. Other changes stemmed from Fabre's almost exclusive attention to finance, and his desire to stress its moral and political implications.

This edition was prepared as an independent or classroom study tool, in Spanish, for students of contemporary Spanish drama. The introduction includes a brief chapter on Valle-Inclan's biography. the following chapters focus their attention on the evolution of the author's style from his early period up to the esperpentos. the opinions of critics are mentioned throughout to familiarize the reader with authoritative references as well as with his work. Once the esperpento period is reached, one chapter is devoted to the treatment of the represented in Luces de bohemia. Finally the play is annotated in English and the difficult vocabulary is glossed. Amplifications at the end of each scene give additional, valuable information. More than fifty sources were consulted and/or quoted. By using this edition the reader deals with only one volume representative of what many references had to say about Valle-Inclan, his times, his works, the esperpento, and Luces the bohemia.

Esta tesis analiza la obra poetica de Jose de Espronceda
desde el punto de vista de su metrica. Espronceda es catalogado
el tipico poeta romantico espanol. Lo que se pretende aqui
es reiterar, a traves de la metrica, la filiacion del poeta al
movimiento. El estudio esta compuesto de los siguientes capitulos:
I) El romanticismo espanol y su metrica; II) El autor
y su obra; III) Las poesias de Espronceda; IV) Borracores y
copias atribuidos a Espronceca; V) Un poema largo; VI) Otro
poema largo. Siguiendo el resumen del movimiento romantico en Espana
en el primer capitulo, el segundo trae la biografia del poeta.
Los capitulos tres, cuatro, cinco y seis estan dedicados a la
obra poetica de Espronceda. Termina este estudio la conclusion
de que la metrica del poeta comprueba la conexion de este a los
preceptos y caracteristicas del movimiento al que pertenece.

Critical studies of Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, while explicating in detail the characterological functions of the women characters, including Gervaise in L'Assommoir and la Maheude in Germinal, have neglected the thematic functions of matriarchy in those texts as in the cycle as a whole. The decline of the matriarch is a prominent component of Zola's naturalistic scheme for the Rougon-Macquart , manifests not only in the increasing corruption of the progeny across the cycle, but primarily in the monographic depictions of the matriarchs themselves. Working-class mothers in particular embody the conflictual tensions of gender inequities and socio-economic deprivations that lead them to produce child-workers to support the family, typically becoming ever more negligent, on the model of Gervaise. Specifically in Germinal, Zola's largely negative conception of the fictive matriarch begins to change. This shift is sustained in subsequent texts of the cycle: the matriarch still suffers almost total loss (of husband, children, position), but she attains a new insight into the socio-economic system that so devours her offspring, and a new lucidity about her position within it.