Roberto González Echevarría

"The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain's Golden Age not only helped that country become the first modern European state, but also affected its great literature. In this book, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse." "Gonzalez Echevarria describes Spain's new legal policies, legislation, and institutions and explains how, at the same time, its literature became filled with love stories derived from classical and medieval sources. Examining the ways that these legal and literary developments interacted in Cervantes's work, he sheds new light on Don Quixote and other writings."--BOOK JACKET.

"From the first amateur teams of the 1860s to the exploits of Livan and Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, here is the history of baseball in Cuba. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria expertly traces the arc of the game, intertwining its heroes and their stories with the politics, music, dance, and literature of the Cuban people. What emerges is more than a story of balls and strikes; it is a richly detailed history of Cuba told from the unique cultural perch of the baseball diamond."--BOOK JACKET.

"Includes 53 stories spanning evolution of short fiction in Brazil as well as Hispanic America across a broad range of writing from colonial era and 19th century to modern favorites such as Lugones, Quiroga, Lima Barreto, Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, Ribeyro, Castellanos, Lispector, Ferré, and Monterroso, in versions by distinguished translators. An essay by the editor traces evolution of the genre. Brief headnotes for each period and author and a short bibliography provide ample contextualization. Recommended for classroom use"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes' novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría's popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes' masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel's major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual's dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that would mesh with his desires. -- from back cover.

This title chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis.

From the publisher. In the Cuban town of Sagua la Grande, a young Roberto González Echevarría peers out the window of his family home on the morning of the Nochebuena fiesta as preparations begin for the slaughter of a feast day pig. The author recalls "watching them at a distance, though thinking, fearing, that once I grew older I would have to participate in the whole event." Now an acclaimed scholar of Latin American literature, González Echevarría returns to the rituals that defined his young life in Cuban Fiestas. Drawing from art, literature, film, and even the national sport of baseball, he vividly reveals the fiesta as a dynamic force of both destruction and renewal in the life of a people. Roberto González Echevarría masterfully exposes the distinctive elements of the fiesta cubana that give depth and coherence to more than two centuries of Cuban cultural life. Reaching back to nineteenth-century traditions of Cuban art and literature, and augmenting them, in the twentieth, with the arts of narrative, the esthetic performances of sport and entertainment in nightclubs, on the baseball diamond, and in movie theaters, Cuban Fiestas renders the lilting strains of the fiesta and drum beats of the passage of time as keys to understanding the dynamic quality of Cuban culture. González Echevarría{u2019}s explorations are also illuminated by autobiographical vignettes that unveil the ever-shifting impact of the fiesta on the author's own story of exile and return.

"Primary and vital resource for literary specialists, historians, students of all levels, and general readers interested in this period. Leading scholars write about diverse genres (narrative, essay, poetry, theater) and cultural interests and ideas (intellectual life, historiography, Viceregal culture, Mesoamerican indigenous peoples and cultures). Literature articles include analysis and discussion of canonic and previously marginalized authors and treat representative works, genres, and literary and philosophical currents. Extremely useful, well written, and interesting"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.