A modern fairy tale that invites children to think about language, noise, and silence.

The idea of a dialogue - sometimes harmonious, sometimes divisive - between the centre and periphery of the early modern European state stands at the heart of much of John Elliott's historical writing. It is the fulcrum around which his Imperial Spain revolves, and it lies at the heart of his analysis of the causes of the revolt of the Catalans against the centralising policies of the Madrid government. His writings on the Americas, such as The Old World and the New, likewise stressed the relationship between centre and periphery. This collection of essays by a group of Elliott's former students examines different aspects of this important theme and develops them. Taken together with the 'personal appreciation' of Elliott (Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford), it forms an important examination of the work of the greatest living historian of Spain as well as a major contribution to early modern European history.

La obra contiene, extractados, todos los libros de emblemas que se publicaron en español durante los siglos XVI y XVII. Se trata de un material de difícil acceso que de este modo se pone a disposición del lector, ya sea investigador o mero aficionado a la riquísima cultura simbólica cifrada en el género de la literatura emblemática. El libro se presenta en primera instancia como índice alfabético de los motivos iconográficos principales presentes en cada emblema. Pero, además, se podrá acceder a los emblemas mediante búsquedas realizadas a partir de los índices complementarios: de autores, lemas, fuentes y claves temáticas, aparte de los motivos iconográficos secundarios. Completa el volumen un glosario terminológico y de personajes que ayuda a la comprensión de los significados. El desarrollo de los estudios de emblemática en el ámbito internacional (existe una extensa Society for Emblem Studies) ha hecho aconsejable introducir traducción al inglés de los campos de información más relevantes. Y las ventajas que proporcionan las nuevas tecnologías han sido aprovechadas con la incorporación de un CD-ROM (ejecutable por igual en los sistemas Macintosh y PC) que agiliza la combinación de búsquedas complejas. Tanto el CD-ROM como el libro reproducen los grabados de los 1.732 emblemas estudiados.

“A poem is an act of faith because the poet believes in it,” contends John Wall Barger in The Elephant of Silence, a collection of essays exploring forms of knowing (and not knowing) that awaken a poetic mind. By considering poetry, film, and the intersections among aesthetic moments and our lives, Barger illuminates the foundations of poetic craft but also probes how to be alive, creative, and open in the world. Each piece investigates unanswerable questions and indefinable words: Lorca’s duende, Nabokov’s poshlost, Bashō’s underglimmer, Huizinga’s ludic, Tarkovsky’s Zona. Influenced by poets such as Glück and Ruefle, and filmmakers such as Kubrick and Lynch, Barger writes—first always sharing his own personal life stories—on the nature of perception, experience, and the human mind. With lyric eloquence and disarming candor, The Elephant of Silence tackles how to live an imaginative life, how to gravitate toward the silence from which art comes, and how the mystical is also the everyday.