Picture a resolute heroine from a seventeenth-century French romance who has been unknowingly teleported to mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Equipped with her worldview fashioned by the beliefs and values of those romances, how would she navigate this unfamiliar world? Would her journey be a seamless progression from one comically ridiculous error to the next? How would she assess the morals and customs of her newfound society, and how would its members perceive her?  In The Female Quixote, Charlotte Lennox embarks on this imaginative experiment. Her Cervantean parody fosters a dynamic reading experience, swinging between complicity and detachment. It projects an image of the parodied romances but also of the social world of eighteenth-century Britain. Encouraging readers to contemplate the fluid interplay between fiction and the real, the novel prompts reflection on the disparities between the social norms of both realms. This study takes a multifaceted approach to Lennox's novel, situating the work in its literary-historical context and examining the narrative features aligning it both with realist novels and romances. Additionally, it analyses key themes and provides summaries of characters and chapters. The study also offers a selection of texts that shed light on the debates accompanying the transition from an older codification of prose fiction to a new contender: the realist novel. The overarching objective is to showcase The Female Quixote's significance in shaping the modern novel's early history.   Lire la suite Fermer

Con este compendio, el lector tendrá elementos para valorar la obra regeneradora y reformadora inédita de la Segunda República española en tiempos de paz. Tras situar este breve periodo en una dinámica que arranca del Desastre de 1898, el volumen considera cada reforma con las inercias presentes y las resistencias que suscita. Una generación de hombres y mujeres muy preparados quisieron reformar el ejército, la enseñanza, el reparto de la propiedad y modos de explotación de la tierra, separar el Estado de la Iglesia. Pero las condiciones adversas complicaron su tarea: crisis económica y mercados cerrados, inercia de los tiempos anteriores, expectativas de las clases populares, obstrucción de las fuerzas tradicionales que tras unos meses de aparente pasividad iniciaron el contraataque. Concebido para candidatos a la oposición, contiene cronologías temáticas y documentos para facilitar la asimilación de los conocimientos. También será de utilidad al lector curioso. Lire la suite Fermer

The election of the first African-American president raised enormous expectations. As a candidate, Barack Obama embodied and campaigned on the idea of "Hope" and "Change". Most presidents usually fall short of their lofty campaign promises. Yet, because Obama's promises were loftier than most, the gap between the campaign's rhetoric and the drab reality of leading the US administration appeared more stark. Barack Obama came to power at a time when polarization within elected officials, the electorate and society at large was growing. Despite the balm of his rhetoric of unity and his efforts to appeal to Republicans, his presidency seemed to supercharge this dynamic. To a large portion of conservatives, he was an illegitimate dictator determined to destroy the American way of life and a weak commander in chief who surrendered US supremacy on the world stage. To many Democrats, he was the symbol of America's forward stride in race relations, a brilliant orator with a steady hand at the helm that took the country out of the depth of the Great Recession and the quagmire of Iraq, while finally providing every American with health insurance, making it possible for same-sex couples to get married and ridding the world of Bin Laden. Obviously, both visions cannot be true. Fortunately, the study of his presidency offers a way out of the trap of hagiographies and negative pamphlets to look at the power of his office and the limits that he faced. Lire la suite Fermer

Reading Forster's novel and Ivory's film together gives a stunning opportunity to re-assess the representation of Pre-World War One modernity. Far from presenting Edwardian England as a golden period, Howards End explores social structures, social mobility, real estate, the ambivalent relation to culture and new technological modes of communication and transport. Stylistically, the novel breaks new ground with its Protean narrative voice, and transitions towards Modernism with its mythic, musical method. The eponymous house becomes a metaphor for ecological balance, a new kind of extended family structure, a network of connections and a new sense of community. If Howards End as a novel reinvents literary legacy and redefines personal and national heritage, Ivory's adaptation must also be reassessed as so-called heritage cinema, far from the clichés of a purely aesthetic approach. It is no period piece or marketable commodity meant to toe a conservative line, but a carefully woven creative transposition, which also raises social and gendered questions. Lire la suite Fermer

Cuando muere Felipe IV, en 1665, es un Carlos II de cuatro años quien accede al trono de España. El que iba a ser el último representante de la ilustre dinastía de los Habsburgo españoles pasaba así a heredar un Estado en grave situación de crisis demográfica, política y militar, como no dejaron de subrayar los diferentes testimonios de la época.
A las incertidumbres generadas por esta desfavorable coyuntura se sumaban, con el nuevo monarca, las provocadas por la delicada cuestión de la sucesión y la ausencia de una descendencia que permitiera perpetuar el linaje austriaco, una situación juzgada como irremediable, tal y como manifestaron, ya a partir de 1668, los diferentes pactos de reparto de las posesiones de la Monarquía Hispánica firmados entre las naciones europeas en previsión de la muerte del rey español.
No obstante, lejos de resumirse a un simple declive del imperio español y a la sórdida realidad representada por un rey endeble y enfermizo, el reinado de Carlos II significó el impulso de las primeras manifestaciones de una renovación territorial, política, económica y cultural. Aspectos estos que fueron el fruto de un esfuerzo constante por defender la reputación y conservación de la Monarquía española y que constituyeron unas bases nada desdeñables sobre las que iba a apoyarse su sucesor Felipe V, primer soberano Borbón de España. Lire la suite Fermer

This book provides a close reading of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement and its adaptation by Joe Wright, examining the relevance of various critical or theoretical movements such as narratology, adaptation theory and ethical criticism. It shows that the intertextuality and metafiction in McEwan's novel are adapted by Wright in a film which taps into the intermedial logic of metaadaptation. To study how both the novel and the film question the possibilities of their respective medium, this book analyses the ways Atonement disrupts the chronologies of creation and engages in an intricate game with focalisation and narration. The second part investigates the generic, linguistic and aesthetic distortions which aim at breaking and sexing the medium. Lastly, the book tackles the formal and ethical quandaries of Atonement and its "conversation with modernism", suggesting several philosophical and political interpretations of Briony's final confession that "the attempt was all" and of its aesthetic implications in the novel and on screen. Lire la suite Fermer

Edition 2013.

Cet ouvrage, devenu célèbre sous son sigle MCSE, a déjà été utilisé par environ 200 000 personnes, étudiants, chercheurs, universitaires, ingénieurs... L'objectif est d'abord de lire et écrire des textes en anglais scientifique avec facilité et pertinence. L'ouvrage est conçu pour que l'apprenant devienne un véritable utilisateur de l'anglais. La méthode repose sur l'analyse des fonctions et structures nécessaires : measurement, frequency, comparison, modification, ink words, time, cause and consequence, hypothesis, modality, purpose and process, impersonal forms, compound nouns and adjectives. Dans chaque unit, des tests d'auto-évualuation permettent au lecteur de construire son parcours de formation. On peut définir ses objectifs à l'aide de key points et du lexis, en puisant dans les examples in context, les checkpoints...
MCSE est l'outil de base d'une méthode qui comprend un environnement numérique en développement permanent. C'est un "pap-ebook", c'est-à-dire qu'au livre est associé un site web en accès libre qui permet d'effectuer des exercices directement corrélés au livre (des exercices, un programme pour faire une évaluation réaliste de son niveau, des versions audio pour s'entrainer, un répétiteur lexical pour une révision du vocabulaire scientifique, etc.). D'autres outils sont également proposés pour mieux comprendre et mieux s'exprimer oralement. MCSE est la porte d'entrée de tout cet environnement. Lire la suite Fermer