A01=Vincent Barletta
alexander the great
Author_Vincent Barletta
Category=DSBB
chivalry
conqueror
domination
dominion
early modern
empire
empirical
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
era
europe
european
expansion
famous person
heroic
heroism
historical
history
iberia
iberian
islam
leader
leadership
literary
literature
medieval
metaphysical
metaphysics
muslim
novel
orient
portugal
portuguese
regional
romance
ruler
spain
spanish
symbolic
time period
villain
well known
western
Product details
- ISBN 9780226037363
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 17 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come. "Death in Babylon" depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, "Death in Babylon" develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, "Death in Babylon" provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
Vincent Barletta is associate professor of Iberian studies in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.
