Eight Dramas of Calderón - Softcover

Pedro Calderón De La Barca; Edward FitzGerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025206903X ISBN 13: 9780252069031

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2000

Synopsis

Throughout the world, people believe that much of what they do is accidental, ordinary, and inconsequential, while other acts can bring on divine retribution or earn eternal grace. In Man and the Sacred, Caillois demonstrates how humanity's ambiguous attitude toward the sacred influences behavior and culture.
 
Drawing on a diverse array of ethnographic contexts, including the sexual rituals of the Ba-Thong of South Africa and evidence drawn from aboriginal Australian, Eskimo, and traditional Chinese social systems, Caillois analyzes the role of the forbidden in the social cohesion of the group. He examines the character of the sacred in the light of specific instances of taboos and transgressions, exploring wide differences in attitudes toward diet and sex and extreme behaviors associated with the sacred, such as rapture and paroxysm. He also discusses the festival--an exuberant explosion following a period of strict repression--and compares its functions with those of modern war.
 
A classic study of one of the most fundamental aspects of human social and spiritual life, Man and the Sacred--presented here in Meyer Barash's superb English translation--is a companion volume to Caillois's Man, Play and Games.
 

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) was one of the great poets and dramatists of Spain's golden age, contemporary with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Velazquez. His work mirrors the society of his time, capturing Spain's strong sense of faith and honor, its mystical and romantic bias, and its finely tuned historical consciousness.

Staples of Spanish golden age drama, Calderon's plays remain superb entertainment. Marking the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth, this reissue of Edward FitzGerald's masterful translations includes The Mighty Magician, a Faustian story of religious conversion; The Painter of His Own Dishonor, a tale of jealousy that reflects the strict Spanish honor code; and Calderon's symbolic and philosophical masterpiece, "Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of".

About the Author:

Roger Caillois (1913-78), a French philosopher and writer, was a cofounder of France's pathbreaking Collège de Sociologie pour l'Étude du Sacré and the founding editor of Diogenes, the journal of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. His books included works of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, art, and literary criticism. Meyer Barash, coeditor of Marriage and the Family: A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Problems, was on the faculty of Hofstra College in New York.
 

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 025206903X
• ISBN 13: 9780252069031
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448