Publications

This book is a compilation of a selection of Hannan Hever’s essays, articles, and reviews about Hebrew poetry published over thirty years. They deal with the poetry of, among others, Yaakov Fichman; Yocheved Bat-Myriam; Nathan Alterman; Ezra Zusman; Shimon Helkin; Avraham Huss and Pinchas Sade, together with younger poets such as Nathan Zach; Meir Wiezeltier; Harold Schimel; Oded Peled; Yitzhak Laor; Maya Bezerano and Galit Hazan-Rokem.

Other articles are broader studies of, for example, the beginnings of modern Hebrew poetry; the poetry of the Lebanon War; Hebrew women’s poetry; and Israeli poetry written in the wake of the war of ‘73.

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain’s Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto González Echevarría explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse. González Echevarría describes Spain’s new legal policies, legislation, and institutions and explains how, at the same time, its literature became filled with love stories derived from classical and medieval sources.

How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.

The book demonstrates the unity of Don Quijote, organized through the technique of interlace. The novel’s episodes and interpolated stories mirror and comment on one another in a carefully constructed design that describes the historical transition from feudal society to a world of money and nascent capitalism.

The symbol ruled 1930s and 1940s thoughts and writing of Israeli Hebrew poetry. In 1934 Avraham Shlonsky published Rough Stones, a book of poems that became the textbook of the symbolistic school of poetry that gathered around him. Nathan Alterman, Yocheved Bat-Miryam, Ezra Zusman, Yakov Orland, Lea Goldberg, Avraham Halfi, Alexander Penn, Yonatan Ratosh and others all wrote, in their own fashion musical symbolistic, precisely styled poetry, centered on the grief of modern existence as a general human stance, abstract, at times also pacifist, being realized in European spaciousness.