Every major Peruvian author of the twentieth century has written a narrative focused on childhood or coming of age. Mining Memory argues that Peruvian narratives of the twentieth century re-imagine childhood not only to document personal pasts, but also to focus on national identity as a dynamic and incomplete process. Mining Memory shows how 20th-century narratives and films reimagine the self and the nation by representing child and adolescent protagonists and their evolution, using the remembrance of childhood as part of a nation-making project. The book demonstrates how, in the context of Peru, fictions focusing on childhood become vehicles for the national reimagining and collective remembering central to much of Latin American literature. The figure of the child, as emblem of both a collective memory and an always deferred utopian project, holds special promise for twentieth-century Peruvian writers as they write from a national context rife with cultural, racial and political conflict. The book intervenes in debates internal to Peruvian cultural studies as well as wider conversations in Latin American Studies and post-colonial studies. Mining Memory provides a new understanding to both the Latin American and Anglo-American traditions regarding the representations of national subjectivities through the voices of the child and adolescent. Such a representational strategy performs a very particular kind of hybridity and temporal balancing act capable of addressing the very issues of cultural memory and fractured identities so relevant to multi-cultural, post-colonial cultural contexts.

After decades of uncomfortable silence, Spain has now started dealing with its violent twentieth-century past. In recent years, a vibrant memory discourse has emerged in Spanish society: the number of films, TV series, newspaper articles, history books, and memorials dedicated to the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the ensuing dictatorship of Franco has increased dramatically. Literature has also played its part in provoking and maintaining this memory boom, and as a consequence, the study of contemporary Spanish novels has started revolving around questions on the responsibility of the author, on the impact of literature in society, on its role in shaping memories, and on its ethical status. This book takes up these questions in an attempt to combine the outlook of collective memory studies with the theoretical demands of Poststructuralist theories. Focusing on themes such as haunting and the uncanny, nostalgia, the Bildungsroman genre, and autobiography, its author analyses memory narratives in fourteen novels by foremost Spanish authors like Javier Marías, Luis Goytisolo, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Manuel Vicent. -- From publisher's website.

Esta publicación recoge las ponencias plenarias y las comunicaciones presentadas y leídas en el VII Simposio Internacional de la SEDLL, que con el título Canon, literatura infantil y juvenil y otras literaturas, fue asumido por la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha y se celebró en Ciudad Real, en diciembre de 2001. Aparecen aquí recogidas también las actividades relacionadas con los estudios mencionadas arriba: talleres y seminarios que suscitaron provechosas discusiones, sugerencias y debates. Como dice Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázquez en la Presentación: La celebración del VII Simposio con su doble concreción en el título, del objeto de estudio, y de su relación con el canon, ha venido a representar un hito importante. Este Simposio pretendía, ya desde su diseño por parte del Comité Científico, un nuevo planteamiento de orientaciones críticas y metodológicas en el ámbito de la educación y de la investigación en torno a la literatura que leen los niños y los jóvenes de hoy en día en el contexto de la sociedad tecnológica moderna. Creemos que esta publicación permite afirmar que se ha cumplido con los objetivos previstos para cada una de las áreas temáticas.

Año 1453, el Imperio Romano de Oriente cae tras sobrevivir a su hermano, el Imperio Romano de Occidente. Europa en época medieval: imperios, reinos, repúblicas independientes.