In the final meeting of the term, the reading group will discuss the after-life of Fuente Ovejuna. The play has become a classic, but has also been staged on multiple occasions in a variety of complex historical contexts, from the Soviet Union to the period of the Spanish Civil War, and to countries under dictatorship in the second half of the twentieth-century. We will ask what this means for us as historians and scholars of visual and literary cultures, and whether the subsequent use that is made of a any kind of source matters or not for our handling of them. We will also watch short clips of modern interpretatuons of the play.
Reading:
C.C. Oechler, 'Dictating aesthetic and political legitimacy through Golden Age Theatre: Fuente Ovejuna at the Teatro Español, directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena (1944)', Hispanic Review 86:4 (2018): 439-461.
J.T. Parker, 'Recruiting the literary tradition: Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna as cultural weapon during the Spanish Civil War', Bulleting of the Comediantes 62:1 (2010): 123-143.
C.B. Weimer, 'The politics of adaptation: Fuenteovejuna in Pinochet's Chile', in Exhoes and inscriptions: Comparative approaches to early modern Spanish literatures, edited by B.A. Simerka and C.B. Weimar (2000), pp. 234-249.
