Australia and Galicia in Transnational Narratives

This article analyzes the transnational features of narratives between Galicia and Australia from the year 1519 to the Present-day. Sailors like Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Váez de Torres, who reached Australia in the sixteenth century, will be considered as the starting point of a cultural dialogue still going on in today’s literature not only as regards the geography of the continent but also in the collective imagination of the country. Other connections between these countries are also established by contemporary novelists such as Peter Carey, Sally Morgan and Murray Bail, who use Galician history and places, filtered through British sources, to address Australia and its present-day characters and decolonizing conflicts. Finally, the works of other authors such as Robert Graves and Félix Calvino, who also deal with this literary dialogue in their fiction, are explored

The Reception of Galician Performances and (Re)translations of Shakespeare

This presentation will deal with the reception of performances, translations and retranslations of Shakespeare’s plays into the Galician language. As is well-known, Galician is a Romance language which historically shared a common origin with Portuguese in the Iberian Peninsula, and which had a different evolution due to political reasons, i.e. the independence of Portugal and the recentralization of Spain after a long partition with the so called Catholic monarchs. As a consequence, Galician ceased to be the language of power and culture as it was during the Middle Ages, and was spoken by peasants and the lower classes in private contexts for centuries. With the disappearance of Francoism in the 1970s, the revival of Galician and its use as a language of culture was felt as a key issue by the Galician intelligentsia and by the new autonomous government formed in 1981. In order to increase the number of speakers of the language and to give it cultural respectability, translations and performances of prominent playwrights, and particularly those by Shakespeare were considered instrumental. This article will analyse the use of Shakespeare’s plays as an instrument of gentrification of the Galician language, so that the association with Shakespeare would confer a marginalized language social respectability and prestige

Enseñando ciudadanía intercultural mediante materiales auténticos: el Reino Unido y España en la prensa inglesa del año 1793

This paper explores ways in which intercultural citizenship can be investigated by students through the use of both archival material and extracted information from the daily press, now widely accessible in databases, and how to convey the significance of transcultural exchange and historical events to students of English language and cultures at the university level. The theoretical framework employed is that of the relationship between language and identity, in which international events are contextualized through their effects on the daily lives of citizens. Additionally, the cultural, economic and political exchanges between the Iberian Peninsula and the United Kingdom described in these documents prove instrumental in the formation of present-day students’ identity, as well as raising their critical intercultural awareness.Este trabajo muestra un ejemplo de investigación del concepto y praxis de la ciudadanía intercultural mediante el uso de documentación archivística e informaciones de prensa procedentes de bases de datos accesibles para los docentes del siglo XXI, con el fin de que el estudiantado universitario de lengua y culturas inglesas pueda conocer intercambios transculturales y acontecimientos históricos. El marco teórico utilizado es la relación entre la lengua y la identidad mediante la que estos eventos aparecen contextualizados en la vida diaria de la ciudadanía. Además, los intercambios culturales, económicos y políticos presentes en los documentos citados resultan de gran utilidad para incrementar la conciencia crítica intercultural del estudiantado actual, así como la formación de su propia identidad.This paper has been possible thanks to the research networks (R 2014/043) funded by the Galician Government (Xunta de Galicia) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and FFI2015-71025-REDT, and to the research projects FFI2012-35872, and FEM2015-66937-P funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad). These grants are hereby gratefully acknowledged

Marisol Morales-Ladrón, editor. Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film

Reseña

Mary Hays’s Biography of María de Estrada, a Spanish Woman in the American Conquest

This article focuses on Mary Hays’s entry of María de Estrada in her Female Biography (1803), and how this English writer dealt with issues of gender, race, religion and nation by means of the mere inclusion of Estrada in this collection of women’s biographies. It studies the life of María de Estrada as inscribed in the fruitful transatlantic dialogue between the Iberian metropolis and the American continent at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the analysis of her ordeal, issues of colonization are intermingled with those of ethnic persecution. De Estrada is believed to have been a Jew suffering difficulties in the Spanish city of Toledo; she had later an additional plight as a foundling girl living with the Gypsies in order to blur her origin, and thus escape ethnic cleansing. Subsequently, her role as an expatriate woman, who would leave her country of origin on board of a ship in the Hernán Cortés Expedition, is also analyzed