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In 1713 Scipione Maffei premiered his tragedy Merope in which he gave form to a Greek legend treated by Euripides in a work almost completely lost today. The tragedy showed the pathos of the feelings of a mother who saw the life of her only son threatened by the tyrant who, years earlier, had murdered the king, her husband, along with her two eldest sons. Voltaire, in 1744, introduced some structural changes in Maffei's work that enhanced the interest and pathos of his plot. In 1783, Alfieri accepted Voltaire’s changes and chose to strengthen the figure of the tyrant and to increase the sentimental role of Polidoro, the adoptive father of the hidden prince. Bretón de los Herreros, in 1835, the year of the emergence of romantic theatre in Spain, fostered harmony with Madrid audiences by giving some touches of romanticism to the story and raising the pathetic component of the maternal and paternal-child affections, linked to tyranny and to his violent overthrow, that had already been offered by his predecessors. Maffei, Voltaire and Alfieri achieved notable success with their works, while Breton failed in an unappealable way, quite possibly because it was a tragedy with a classical theme and because of that same pathetic exaggeration that turned it into a melodrama with a happy ending that came to collide with the wretched endings of romantic dramas.

Winner of the Goncourt Prize in 1951, Béatrix Beck’s novel Léon Morin, prêtre has been adapted for the screen twice: the homonymous film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1961 and, very recently, Nicolas Boukhrief’s version titled La confession. In this article, we address the study of both versions paying special attention to the treatment they make of the original work, which in turn is revealing of the cinematographic project of the filmmakers, and, more generally, of their view of the art of film adaptation. Considered a cult director, Melville remains faithful to the original, no doubt because he considers that the proven quality of the novel works in favor of that of the movie. In turn, Boukhrief completely rewrites Beck’s text to obtain a product capable of attracting the interest of today’s average viewer.

In the present study, two literary topoi related to love are introduced and their historical evolution from the Classical tradition towards modern culture is traced. Their realization in Eugene O'Neill's modern American tragedy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) is also studied. These topoi are specifically: 'love out of hatred' and 'jealousy in love'. It is argued that both topoi comprise four stages, emerge from the Ancient Greek and Roman literature and evolve into modern culture, as in O'Neill's play, following the tradition. Moreover, despite critics' claim that O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electrais basically influenced by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus's retelling of the story of Orestes and Electra, the contextualization of these two topoi follows the tradition of Homer's Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses . Finally, in this study, the appearance of each topos in contemporary world television and cinema such as the British Becoming Jane (2007), the Iranian Shahrzad Series (2015) and the American La La Land (2016) is studied. 

After locating the coordinates of our poet, we intend to consider the production of the Argentine Héctor Viel Temperley (Buenos Aires, 1933-1987) according to the Semiotics of passions (1991,) proposed by Greimas and Fontanille, and according to the precisions of The semiotic turn, by Paolo Fabbri (1989). The notion and the term 'passion' make it possible to point out discursivization of what we have called 'border violence', coinciding with what goes beyond what is strictly rational. Through overflow, passion is introduced into the discourse through figurativizations. In turn, it is the mobile of action. In the case of Viel Temperley, the 'emotion-action' link is constantly present. His poetic discourse is built on the body as a proprioceptive edge. A body in which present, past and future are revealed together; a body in whose figurativizations the excess of meaning appears as a disturbing fold that cannot finish grasping. A body-effigy, an erotic body, athletic, a maker; moreover, in Viel's collections of poems, the text gradually becomes its own body. He even goes so far as to propose a 'soulbody' unit. Sickness is the only time it stops, but it acts as an engine. From sickness is originated the seeking of survival; even more: the 'hope of survival', with a logic of combat, aspires to final victory through “ascesis”, a making process that does not stop even with death.

This article sets to analyze the dramas Julius von Tarent by Johann Anton Leisewitz and Die Zwilinge by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, both published in 1776 and exponents of the drama of the Sturm und Drang. It will study the motivations of the characters and the reinterpretations that each work offers of the fratricide of Cain and Abel: in Leisewitz, Julius cannot unite the spheres of reason of State and love, so he decides to rebel against the former and try to flee, but Guido prevents him and ends up murdering him; in Klinger, Guelfo questions Ferdinando’s birthright and claims it for himself, considering that it has been stolen and given everything to his brother. Through the actions of the characters in both dramas, the machinery of subordination and exercise of power that operates in them becomes visible. It is concluded that the works should not be seen as revolutionary dramas, but that in them operates an incipient critique of the enlightenment postulates and shows the decadence and imminent collapse of a society/family too rigid and hypocritical that seeks only its preservation and continuity without considering the internal consequences, i.e., the fragmentation and polarization that they may cause.

Firstly, we identify the linguistic concept of Ibero-Romance and the area that it occupies since, in the Onomasticon Cataloniae by Joan Coromines, it is one of the fundamental factors to be take into account in any comparison of Catalan with the other Romance languages. Then we offer a selection of data from this area divided into four subsections: (1) Castilian, (2) Aragonese, (3) Asturo-Leonese and (4) Galician-Portuguese, in each of which we examine specific facets or subareas. Thus, in the case of Castilian, we look at the traces of the linguistic variety of Almeria, attributable to the author’s wife, the Castilian used in the territory bordering on Valencia (hablas churras), and extrapeninsular elements. In the case of Aragonese, the linguistic frontier with Catalan and cross-border penetration of Aragonese influence. And, in the case of Asturo-Leonese and Galician-Portuguese, the two components of the nomenclature and the respective territories. The sample examined consists basically of toponyms, but also lexis and, to a lesser extent, anthroponymy. The research team that produced the digital version of the work have also endeavoured to identify and label the Ibero-Romance materials and others to be found in the work.

In this essay we study verbal music, its definition and evolution to show how this type of music —from its emotional meaning— can create unique narrative spaces, in which author and reader are essential protagonists. To accomplish that, we start from the Paul Scher’s definition of verbal music, which was recently analyzed by Ivan Delazari as diegetic music. Then we explore its semantic core (emotions), its communicative process, and its poetic language. Once we have detailed which features that created space could have, we will perform an analysis of diegetic music and its unique spaces in epic fantasy novel The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.

The great novelty of the painting Experiment with an Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby was to present science in the artistic center of attention that religion had occupied in a majority way until then. Two centuries later, and inspired by this work, the English poets Sue Hubbard and John Forth used the resource of ekphrasis to make a reflection on science from poetry. Their poetic compositions are in the voice of the scientist and that of one of the girls, respectively, and invite a reflection on the objectives and limits of science within postmodern society.

Se trata de una reseña del libro editado por Luarsabishvili, Vladimer, con título Rethinking Society. Individuals, Culture and Migration. Volume 2: Migration and Society. Literature, Translation, Film. Tbilisi, New Vision University Press, 2021, 148 págs.

The aim of this work is to highlight those questions, as well as the conclusions, which are considered to be the most interesting ones that the author of this work reached when writing her doctoral thesis. Thus, first of all, it will be briefly presented, the figure of Elizabeth Gaskell in relation to the idea of woman established in the Victorian era, trying to see to what extent she adapted and adjusted to the standards established in the society of her time, taking into account nineteenth-century England concept of how women should be and behave, their obligations and responsibilities. Subsequently, a review will be made of her novels, looking at Gaskell's reflection of English society at the time, as well as the criticism that arose around these works during the 19th, 20th and early 21st centuries.