Bucolic Metaphors

Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Though interest in the use of metaphor in the Hebrew Bible has gained momentum in recent years, there is, to date, no investigation which concentrates exclusively on the animal metaphors in the book of Jeremiah. In this book, the author brings to light this neglected area of study by examining the language and imagery of the animal metaphors for the people of Israel in the book of Jeremiah. The contribution that these metaphors make to the theology of the book is given special attention, and since different interpretations have been given to many of the metaphors in question, the author resolves some of the questions regarding the meaning of these images in his in-depth study. Additionally, scholars have not tended to research metaphors for the nation of Israel and thus this volume draws attention to a particular subject which has largely been overlooked.In chapter one Foreman familiarizes the reader with the major theoretical approaches to metaphor and spells out the approach taken in his investigation. Eighteen metaphors are then thoroughly analyzed in chapters two, three, and four. These metaphors are grouped into three categories, each of which constitutes a chapter: pastoral metaphors, mammal metaphors, and bird metaphors. Chapter five draws the results of the inquiry together. This study reveals how animal metaphors make important theological claims about the nation of Israel and demonstrates that they are essential elements of the message of the book of Jeremiah. Foreman's elucidation of the language and imagery of the animal metaphors for the people of Israel leads to a richer understanding of these metaphors and ultimately contributes to a more precise interpretation of the message of the book of Jeremiah as a whole.

A careful re-evaluation of pastoral poetics in the early modern Hispanic literature of Spain and Latin America. In her analysis of the verse of representative poets of the Hispanic Baroque, Holloway demonstrates how these writers occupy an Arcadia which is de-familiarised and yet remains connected to the classical origins of the mode. Herstudy includes recent manuscript discoveries from the Spanish Baroque (Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa, now attributed to the Gongorist poet Pedro Soto de Rojas), the poetry of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Francisco de Quevedo. The study considers pastoral as a global cultural phenomenon of the Early Modern period, its reverberations reaching as far as Viceregal Peru. The tradition of the pastoral as a site for the discussion of 'great matters in theforest' has deep roots, and re-emerges to praise the urban hearts of empire. Furthermore, it proves to be a site of spiritual encounter--a poetic space that frames the staging of indigenous conversion in the poetry of Diego Mexiaand Fernando de Valverde. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text. Anne Holloway is a Lecturer in Spanish, Queen's University Belfast.

This study explores a previously uncharted area of ancient literary theory and criticism: the ancient landscapes (such as the Ilissus river in Athens and Mount Helicon) that generate metaphors for distinguishing styles, which dovetail with ancient conceptions of metaphor as itself spatial and mobile. Ancient writers most often coordinate stylistic features with country settings, where authoritative performers such as Muses, poets, and eventually critics or theorists view, appropriate, and emulate their bounties (for example springs, flowers, rivers, paths). These spaces of metaphor and their elaborations provide poets and critics with a vivid means of distinguishing among styles and an influential vocabulary. Together these figurative terrains shape critical and theoretical discussions in Greece and beyond. Since this discourse has a remarkably wide reach, the book is broad in scope, ranging from archaic Greek poetry through Roman oratory and 'Longinus' to the reception of critical imagery in Proust and Derrida.

This thematic fourth Supplementum to Ancient Narrative, entitled Metaphor and the Ancient Novel, is a collection of revised versions of papers originally read at the Second Rethymnon International Conference on the Ancient Novel (RICAN 2) under the same title, held at the University of Crete, Rethymnon, on May 19-20, 2003.Though research into metaphor has reached staggering proportions over the past twenty-five years, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to the subject of metaphor in relation to the ancient novel. Not every contributor takes into account theoretical discussions of metaphor, but the usefulness of every single paper lies in the fact that they explore actual texts while sometimes theorists tend to work out of context.

Felipe Valencia examines the construction of lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sings of and perpetrates symbolic violence against the feminine and the female beloved in key texts of Spanish poetry from 1580 to 1620.

The Spanish Arcadia analyzes the figure of the shepherd in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish imaginary, exploring its centrality to the discourses on racial, cultural, and religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of documents, including theological polemics on blood purity, political treatises, manuals on animal husbandry, historiography, paintings, epic poems, and Spanish ballads, Javier Irigoyen-García argues that the figure of the shepherd takes on extraordinary importance in the reshaping of early modern Spanish identity. The Spanish Arcadia contextualizes pastoral romances within a broader framework and assesses how they inform other cultural manifestations. In doing so, Irigoyen-García provides incisive new ideas about the social and ethnocentric uses of the genre, as well as its interrelation with ideas of race, animal husbandry, and nation building in early modern Spain.

Millennial Cervantes explores some of the most important recent trends in Cervantes scholarship in the twenty-first century. It brings together leading Cervantes scholars of the United States in order to showcase their cutting-edge work within a cultural studies frame that encompasses everything from ekphrasis to philosophy, from sexuality to Cold War political satire, and from the culinary arts to the digital humanities. Millennial Cervantes is divided into three sets of essays—conceptually organized around thematic and methodological lines that move outward in a series of concentric circles. The first group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in his original contexts,” features essays that bring new insights to these texts within the primary context of early modern Iberian culture. The second group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in comparative contexts,” features essays that examine Cervantes’s works in conjunction with those of the English-speaking world, both seventeenth- and twentieth-century. The third group, focused on the concept of “Cervantes in wider cultural contexts,” examines Cervantes’s works—principally Don Quixote—as points of departure for other cultural products and wider intellectual debates. This collection articulates the state of Cervantes studies in the first two decades of the new millennium as we move further into a century that promises both unimagined technological advances and the concomitant cultural changes that will naturally adhere to this new technology, whatever it may be.

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.