Books published by Legenda

The Italian Renaissance marks the beginning of the modern era in Western Europe. New energies are liberated, transforming the fabric of society, intellectual life, and indeed the whole vision of the world. Artists and writers bear witness to and actively participate in the unfolding dynamics and thereby play an important role in shaping the present.Through its exceptional collection of books of Renai­ssance Italian poetry, the Barbier-Mueller Foundation plays a dynamic role in awakening and remoulding our con­scious­ness of what is unquestionably a key moment in European culture. The Foundation has invited a fascinating array of major writers and scholars to explore this inheritance by writing freely and creatively on the subject, whether in the form of fiction, historical reverie or personal meditation.The contributors are Etienne Barilier, Lina Bolzoni, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Butor, Dominique Fernandez, Adrien Goetz, Michel Jeanneret, Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, Carlo Ossola, Pascal Quignard, Francisco Rico, Cesare Segre, Lionello Sozzi, Edna Stern, Carlo Vecce, and Marina Warner.

This volume tracks a Montaigne 'in transit' all the way from the genesis and production of his Essais and travel journal in the 1570s-90s to their diffusion and reception from the 1580s up till the present day, in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere. The contributors take those key terms - genesis, production, diffusion, reception - as their starting-point, but show that the boundaries between them are blurred. How does embodied thought move through space and time between the author and reader of the Essais? Can the role of the ancient writers whom Montaigne quotes be assessed without consideration of the differences he knew there would be between readers' capacities to recognise and contextualise those quotations? Where does Montaigne's punctuation end and that of his compositors, editors, and translators begin?This volume asks such questions by exploring transit as a critical concept cutting across different languages, places, and times. Its authors include leading specialists in early modern French and English studies. It is a tribute to Ian Maclean, whose own trailblazing work has moved through and across numerous fields of early modern learned culture.

In recent years, interdisciplinary and comparative outlooks, greatly facilitated by the advent of new technologies, have transformed the discipline of Spanish Studies, leading to a re-evaluation of its scope and boundaries. To what extent is it legitimate to speak of 'Spanish Studies', given the linguistic and cultural diversity of Spain and the increasingly globalised nature of the world in which we live? How have digital technologies transformed the discipline, and, indeed, its objects of study? Have our methodologies and vocabulary kept apace with these advances? How do recent changes affect our access to and interpretation of cultural texts, past and present? And conversely: how do current re-evaluations of the past affect our understanding of the present? Thirteen early career researchers grapple with these and other questions in a collection of essays that elucidate the ways in which emerging scholars negotiate the urge to revise, re-shape or challenge the canon (transforming their discipline in the process), with the need to integrate their discourse within existing disciplinary boundaries.Stuart Davis is Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Girton College, and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge. Maite Usoz de la Fuente is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Leicester.

At a time when women were effectively silenced in church, St Teresa of Ávila (1515-82) represents an extraordinary exception. Early struggles with her spiritual advisers gave way to an increasing confidence that she was inspired by God. She reformed the Carmelite Order she had entered as a young woman, and founded convents all over Spain, yet still found time to write a series of spiritual classics on the life of prayer which are characterized by a robust common sense, a directness of style, and a strong and positive vision of God's love at work in individual lives. This collection of essays by leading scholars in Teresian studies covers topics in history, art history, literature, theology, and spirituality, in a fresh assessment of her significance five hundred years after her birth.

If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world. - Arthur SymonsArthur Symons (1865-1945) was a central figure in the cultural and social networks of the British fin de siècle. He was an often controversial poet and critic who introduced British readers to French Decadence and Symbolism and had an equally important if largely unacknowledged influence on the development of modernism. In 1908 - the year of a mental breakdown that had a disastrous effect both on his career and posthumous reputation - W.B. Yeats referred to him as 'the best critic of his generation.' Symons's vast body of work also includes fiction and writings on the visual arts, music, theatre and the popular stage, as well as translations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and D'Annunzio. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of Symons's interests, reassessing this dynamic writer who played a key mediating role between English and European literatures, and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Transgressive by nature, erotic literature engages the reader in a dialogue informed by the social and aesthetic conventions that it playfully disregards or happily reproduces. But once this intimate, arousing and, often, disturbing dialogue transitions into another language, culture or medium, it must reposition itself within new conventions. How does this happen in practice?Examining erotic literature from multiple angles, this volume starts off with an ethical evaluation of the most recent rendering of Marquis de Sade into English. Other inquiries into European letters include the works of Goethe, Georges Bataille, Pierre Guyotat and E. L. James, and the films of Michael Haneke and Patrice Chéreau. Studies of Chinese and Japanese erotic traditions complement the picture by addressing the different functions of the erotic in discrete cultural settings.Johannes D. Kaminski is Marie Sk¿odowska-Curie Fellow at University of Vienna.