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Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age

Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age

by Alban K. Forcione (Author)

  • New

    Illustrated 2009

    $85.60
Synopsis

Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major testing grounds where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace everything in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying the idea of creation. The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge--artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry--brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.

$85.60

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
 Pages: 300
 Edition: Illustrated
 Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 03 Feb 2009
ISBN 10: 0300134401
ISBN 13: 9780300134407

Media Reviews
[The] author isolates what he terms 'spaces of debate' in order to propose that Lope and his contemporaries provide the opportunity for kings to remove their masks, literally and figuratively, to explore-and for spectators to contemplate-nonabsolutist ideas and forms of behavior. The study is most notable for the breadth of erudition that Forcione displays in his treatment of the thesis and in his allusions to the literature of the period and to the broader ideological spectrum... Highly recommended. -E. H. Friedman, Choice Prodigious, both in terms of its erudition and analytical depth, Majesty and Humanity brings our reflections on the political imagination of the antiguo regimen to a new height... The distinctiveness of this study, I would emphasize, lies in its relentless avoidance of simplification, in its utter command of Baroque multiperspectivism... Beautifully written and magisterial in its luxurious intertwining of literary, cultural, social, and political analysis, Majesty and Humanity is a must for all scholars of the Baroque. -Ariadna Garcia-Bryce, Renaissance Quarterly Through a brilliant analysis that incorporates his readings in history, political science, theology, and theater, Forcione offers a fresh view of two complex and paradoxical plays. -Barbara Mujica, 1650-1850 An impressive, exciting work of criticism and scholarship. -David Quint, Yale University In its complex engagement with institutions of kingship, this massively original work enlightens readers on what it meant to be king of Spain from the Visigoths down to the Golden Age. -Diana de Armas Wilson An impressive, exciting work of criticism and scholarship. -David Quint, Yale University -- David Quint In its complex engagement with institutions of kingship, this massively original work enlightens readers on what it meant to be king of Spain from the Visigoths down to the Golden Age. -Diana de Armas Wilson -- Diana de Armas Wilson
Author Bio
Alban K. Forcione is Walter S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of the Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain Emeritus at Princeton University, and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Emeritus at Columbia University. He lives in Princeton, NJ.