Literature & Culture

During the French Revolution, traditional literary forms such as the sentimental novel and the moral tale dominate literary production.

A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922). But while many commentators have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood that waits to be explored.

Tirso de Molina's Marta the Divine (c. 1614-15) is a spirited comedy about an ingenious young woman who fakes religious piety in order to avoid an arranged marriage imposed upon her by her father.

Tirso de Molina's Jealous of Herself (c. 1622-23) is an ingenious comedy of disguise and deception, set in the streets, plazas and fashionable apartments of early 17th-century Madrid.

That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment .

As the title indicates, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Jealousy tragically dramatizes the same key themes and emotions that preoccupied Shakespeare in Othello. His portrayal of the mind and passion of King Herod, a ruler traditionally vilified in Catholic Spain during Calderón's age, reveals a compassionate understanding and lack of prejudice.