Books by "Esther García González"
2 books found
Beyond the Market
by Reyna Pastor, Esther Pascua, Ana Rodríguez López, Pablo Sánchez León
2021 · BRILL
This volume deals with the social implications of land transactions, especially with the role of personal and institutional networks in a precapitalist society. The four authors discuss different aspects of the relationship between three monasteries (two Cistercians, Montederramo and Oseira, and one Benedictine nunnery, Ramiranes) and the peasant communities around them in thirteenth-Century Galicia. They use a Data Base to register 2500 'foros', the typical Galician land contract and more than 8000 people and their goods. The thesis of the authors is that monasteries did not exert their authority upon powerless peasants, but constraint by preexisting networks of local people. Most of the peasants involved in the transactions turned out to be members of 'middle groups' like knights, squires or upper peasants. The book is especially important for all those interested in social perspectives as a means to understand the medieval economy.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, during an economic crisis termed its “special period in times of peace,” Cuba began to court the capitalist world for the first time since its 1959 revolution. With the U.S. dollar instated as domestic currency, the island seemed suddenly accessible to foreign consumers, and their interest in its culture boomed. Cuban Currency is the first book to address the effects on Cuban literature of the country’s spectacular opening to foreign markets that marked the end of the twentieth century. Based on interviews and archival research in Havana, Esther Whitfield argues that writers have both challenged and profited from new transnational markets for their work, with far-reaching literary and ideological implications. Whitfield examines money and cross-cultural economic relations as they are inscribed in Cuban fiction. Exploring the work of Zo Valds, Pedro Juan Gutirrez, Antonio Jos Ponte and others, she draws out writers’ engagements with the troublesome commodification of Cuban identity. Confronting the tourist and publishing industries’ roles in the transformation of the Cuban revolution into commercial capital, Whitfield identifies a body of fiction peculiarly attuned to the material and political challenges of the “special period.” Esther Whitfield is assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University.