 Clark Zlotchew, Ph.D. |
The year 2011 was a time of mob action starting in Athens, spreading to other European cities and to the Arab world. The U.S. saw mass protests as well. A profound understanding of mob behavior was evinced by the great Spanish author, Benito Perez Galdos, even before Freud and Jung wrote their treatises on the subject.
It is significant then, that The Authors Guild announces the publication of Libido into Literature: The "Primera Epoca" of Benito Perez Galdos, by Clark M. Zlotchew, through its Backinprint.com program. Dr. Zlotchew is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Spanish at SUNY Fredonia, NY, and is the author of 17 books.
The Authors Guild's Backinprint.com service makes out-of-print works available through bookstores and the nation's largest book wholesaler. Libido into Literature: The "Primera Epoca" of Benito Perez Galdos, is a psychological, biographical and literary study of the self-contained series of novels of the formative period of Benito Perez Galdos as a novelist. It traces the thought patterns and illuminates the creative process of the greatest Spanish author of the movement known as Realism.
Libido into literature: The "Primera Epoca" of Benito Perez Galdos elucidates the imagery, the symbolism, the evocative language, the biblical and mythical motifs, in short, the rich battery of literary devices by means of which this greatest of 19th-Century Spanish writers converts libido into literature.
The major thrust of this study is not merely to register the themes and thought patterns underlying the novels of Galdos's earliest period, but to delve into the manner in which this great writer creates literature --which is social and political on the surface-- out of instinctual drives and unconscious psychic material.
"Like Galdos's work itself, Clark Zlotchew's study has various facets and can be read for its revelations concerning these specific novels, future novels, Galdos-the-author and Galdos-the-man, and also for what it has to show us about the wealth of discoveries involved in reading novels in general," said Galdosian critic Douglass M. Rogers, of the University of Texas, Austin.
EXCERPT: ... Galdos's creative genius skillfully converts political convictions, as well as raw psychic material -through the employment of a battery of poetic devices: metaphor, imagery, symbolism, biblical and classical allusion as well as parallel plots--into a masterfully woven tapestry of literary art.
