Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Spanish Allegory"

Famous for having been the first Spanish film to feature the Franco-banned bikinis, Bahía de Palma/Palma Bay (Bosch 1962) is generally seen as a frivolous footnote in the history of Spanish cinema, but it is also a pioneering aperturista film, that deserves closer examination as the blue print for late Francoist cultural productions of the 1960s and beyond. This article argues that Bahía de Palma is a veiled allegorical representation of the social and political contradictions that characterized Spain’s reintegration into the international world order after the dark and disastrous period of international isolation during the 1940s and early 1950s.

ABSTRACTAn unprecedented shift in the portrayal of Cupid took place in the Spanish mythological zarzuela during the years surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). For the first time ever, Cupid was depicted not as a god of chaste or erotic love, but as a god at war with other deities. And in every work, a female actor-singer, not a male performer, played the fiery but mournful character. In this article I first explore the cultural understanding of Cupid in early eighteenth-century Spain as articulated by Spanish mythographers of the era, and as seen in the earliest representations of Cupid in Spanish theatre. I then investigate the intersection of myth, allegory, war and music theatre in a case study – the zarzuela Las nuevas armas de amor (Love's New Weapons, 1711) – suggesting that in this work Cupid functioned as an allegorical representation of the Spanish king, and that the deity's struggles for power mirrored the monarch's plight during a time of great political instability. Moreover, I argue that the pre-existing local theatrical practice of cross-dressing allowed for the portrayal of a defeated and sobbing Cupid in the zarzuela.

From the mid-1980's until his untimely death in 2001, the Spanish-born artistJuan Muñoz gained international acclaim for his sculptures, installations andmultimedia projects. This article discusses and interprets some of his figurativesculptural works, using concepts such as simulacrum, alienation, allegory, thestatue as an autonomous entity, and Walter Benjamin's notion of aura. Muñoz'ssculptures strongly invite us into illusionary settings and situations while at thesame time leaving us on the outside, as strangers in awkward situations. Thetheatrical, or performative, character of his larger installations, or tableauxvivants, such as Many Times (1999), questions not only our social andenvironmental relations, but also our individuality, as if we are confrontingmirrors that uncover our vulnerable subjectivity in highly disturbing ways.

In the medieval romances single combat was the knightly norm. The Italian chivalric epics sought to adapt this convention to the ideals of the Renaissance courtier. In Il Cortegiano, Frederico Fregoso explains “that where the Courtyer is at skirmishe, or assault, or battaile upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to worke the matter wisely in seperating himself from the multitude, and undertake his notable and bould feates which he hath to doe, with as little company as he can.“’ But such displays of panache had little place in the massed infantry tactics that dominated the actual battlefields of the sixteenth century. It was disciplined self-restraint that made the Swiss and Spanish pike phalanxes so formidable, relegating cavalry to secondary importance. The Italian courtierknights had been rudely humbled, after all, when Charles XII invaded Italy in 1494 and deployed his excellent artillery.

Within the vast corpus of the nineteenth century Spanish narrative, Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Un viaje de novio, deserve a different consideration due to a particular style adopted by the author and the consideration of travel as an allegory of life. The author departs, hence fore, from the way how travel was understood in the nineteenth century when writers based their travel writings or novels on the scientific and educational aspects. Pardo Bazan explores the transcendental aspect of travel fact and this paper studies the different techniques used by the writer to develop the metaphor of travel considering the geographical movement as an internal trip. The subjective and progressive transformation of the main protagonist, according to the itinerary of the trip, is studied as that internal journey.

How does one translate an avant-garde classic? How might a translation mediate between experimentalism and canonicity as a work travels away from its culture of origin? This article studies Héctor Olea’s Spanish translation of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) as one response to these questions from a Latin American translation zone. First translated for the Barcelona publishing house Seix Barral (1977), his work soon traveled back across the Atlantic to be re-edited into a critical edition for Biblioteca Ayacucho (1979). This article examines letters from the publisher’s archive to demonstrate that debates over the novel as avant-garde art, literary ethnography, or Brazilian national allegory influenced their views on translation. By including two incompatible translation approaches—transcreation and thick translation—the volume reveals an unresolved paradoxical treatment of cultural hybridity at the heart of the text.

ABSTRACT By the turn of the 18th century serenatas performed in Rome's urban squares as political or dynastic propaganda were a well-established ritual. In this public forum the effect of sound produced by large instrumental forces was a central feature, yet the serenata was a complex performance in which music was but one element in a series of other displays. Though undoubtedly an important part of the serenata, music's role in this multifaceted performance and its effect on audiences remain unclear. Part of that ambiguity stems from the serenata's ability to service both public and private consumption. Patrons exploited this dual nature, using the more spectacular elements of the serenata to influence the public at large, while also relying on other elements (primarily word and sound) to sway elite audiences. In the context of Rome and its dynastic politics, Giacomo Buonaccorsi's and Pietro Paolo Bencini's serenata Le gare festive in applauso alla Real Casa di Francia (1704) demonstrates how the serenata's dichotomous structures and multiplicity of meaning were deeply linked to larger cultural frameworks and social tensions——in this case, brewing over the War of Spanish Succession. The serenata was both a musical work and a performed event effectively shaped by the genre's ritual practice and by history and politics in late 17th- and early 18th-century Rome. The logic of the serenata's ritual practice shows significant correspondences to the genre's narrative strategies. Within the serenata, allegory served as the catalyst to express layers of meaning to diverse audiences. But more than that, allegory provided the means by which music was contained and its delivery marked. For public audiences, sound was as much visual as it was aural, an immediate and palpable special effect. For privileged listeners, music required reflection as to how spectacular effects acquired deeper meaning when anchored in the significance of the poetic text. Thus music in the serenata was not merely an element in a multifaceted performance but was multidimensional in itself, uniquely straddling both sides of the public/private divide.

This article analyzes the contribution of the new Catalan documentary in the current process of reclaiming the collective historical memory repressed by Francoism and by the Silence Deal established during the political transition to democracy after Franco’s death. This analysis will consider some films that use the family metaphor as a national allegory to represent the plight of the Catalan nation. The main thesis of this study is to underline the need for reparation regarding the crimes committed by Francoism during and after the Spanish Civil War and the fact that such a reparation has not taken place neither in fiction nor in historical terms. This essay relies on the post-Derridian concept of “hauntology” as a theoretical framework to study the spectral textual encounters that mark the symptoms of an uninterrupted mourning process that appeals to the historical memory in search of dignity and closure. Methodologically, this study offers a close textual reading of Jesús Garay’s film Mirant al cel (Eyes on the Sky, 2008) as a perfect case study where the spectral conflict between victims and victimizers is acted out in the context of Barcelona and Catalonia and the series of urban mass bombings carried out by the Italian Royal Legion under the direct supervision of Il Duce, Mussolini. Garay’s film special relevance lies in the fact of its being one of the few documentaries that revisits those three dramatic days in March 1938 that became a tragic rehearsal of the massive urban aerial raids of the Second World War.

Resumo: Este estudo propõe uma análise centrada na pintura Felipe II, después de la victoria de Lepanto, ofrece al cielo al príncipe don Fernando (Madri, Museu do Prado), de Ticiano Vecellio. Produzida em resposta à encomenda do rei espanhol Felipe II, teve por intenção celebrar dois momentos marcantes de seu reinado no ano de 1571: a vitória sobre a frota turca na batalha de Lepanto e o nascimento de seu herdeiro, o infante Dom Fernando. Com o objetivo de compreender os sentidos e funções do objeto imagético nesse contexto, a linguagem simbólica da pintura é interpretada em conexão com os acontecimentos contemporâneos à sua produção. Apesar de ser reconhecida como a “alegoria da batalha de Lepanto”, de facto, esta é representada em último plano, eclipsada por uma série de elementos carregados de simbolismo dinástico e religioso. Palavras-chave: Felipe II de Espanha; Ticiano Vecellio; Batalha de Lepanto; Iconografia; História e Imagem. Abstract: This study proposes an analysis focused on the painting Felipe II , después de la victoria de Lepanto, ofrece al cielo al prince don Fernando (Madrid, Museum of Prado), by Titian Vecellio. It was produced in response to the request of the Spanish King Philip II, with the intention to celebrate two key moments of his reign in the year 1571: the victory over the turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto and the birth of his heir, the infante Don Fernando. In order to understand the meanings and functions of imagery object in this context, the symbolic language of painting is interpreted in connection with contemporary events to its production. Despite being recognized as the "Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto", in fact, this is represented in the last level, eclipsed by a series of loaded elements of dynastic and religious symbolism. Keywords: Philip II ofSpain; Titian Vecellio;Battle of Lepanto; Iconography; History and Image.

Resumen: Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), noble aficionado a las letras, autor bilingüe en catalán y castellano, residente algunos años (ca. 1416- 1429) de manera intermitente en la corte valenciana de Alfonso V de Aragón y Juan de Navarra, influyó en el concepto de literatura del autor de la novela caballeresca Curial e Güelfa (Enyego d’Àvalos?), escrita en catalán (Nápoles-Milán, c. 1445-1448) y relacionable con la corte italiana del Magnánimo. El Curial presenta conexiones intertextuales con la obra de Villena, además de hápax y neologismos compartidos. Su autor conoció, sin duda, Los dotze treballs d’Hèrcules (Valencia, 1417) y parodió errores mitográficos de la Eneida romanceada, glosada y moralizada por Villena (Valencia, 1427-1429), dos obras a las que alude implícitamente en la suya. Ambos escritores difundieron el ideal del vir scientificus Hércules (Coluccio Salutati) como alegoría del esfuerzo que los caballeros sçientíficos/scientífichs ponían en estudiar los clásicos greco-latinos para crecer en virtud. Y ambos parece que anticiparon un «virgilianismo político» interpretable como la idea de embellecer literariamente los hechos históricos para eternizar la gloria militar en un digno formato.Palabras clave: Literatura catalana medieval, Enrique de Villena, Curial e Güelfa, Enyego d’Àvalos, Eneida glosada.Abstract: Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), a nobleman keen on arts, a bilingual author in Catalan and Spanish, who lived for some years (ca. 1416- 1429) –in a sporadic way– in the Valencian court of Alfonso V of Aragon and John of Navarre, had an influence on the concept of literature to the author of the chivalric novel Curial e Güelfa (Enyego d’Àvalos?), written in Catalan (Naples-Milan, ca. 1445-1448) and which could be related with the Italian court of the Magnanimous. The Curial displays intertextual connections with Villena’s work, apart from shared hapaxes and neologisms. The author was aware of –undoubtedly– Los dotze treballs d’Hèrcules (Valencia, 1417) and parodied mythographic mistakes from the romanced, glossed and moralised Aeneid by Villena (Valencia, 1427-1429), two works that he alludes to implicitly in his own. Both writers spread the ideal of the vir scientificus Hercules (Coluccio Salutati) as an allegory of the effort the sçientíficos/scientífichs knights put on studying the Greek-Latin classics to grow up in virtue. And both seem to anticipate a «political virgilianism» which could be interpreted as the idea of embellishing literarily the historical events to perpetuate the military glory in a respectable format.Keywords: Medieval Catalan literature, Enrique de Villena, Curial e Güelfa, Enyego d’Àvalos, glossed Aeneid.

The Iberian Peninsula has been home to different societies for centuries. With the arrival of Andalusia Umayyads to these lands (711), Eastern culture started to flourish in this geography. Andalusia's architecture, music, literature and popular culture have been able to preserve its traditional structure until today. Towards the end of the 19th century, Spanish piano music started its golden age, and composers used Andalusian folkloric elements in their own musical language. In this study, the characteristics of Spanish music are mentioned, and these musical features are supported by giving examples from the works of Spanish composers. The focus of the study is the common thematic motif which was found in three separate works composed by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), Manuel Ponce (1882-1948), and Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1909). These works are respectively En los Jardines de la Cierra de Cordoba part of Noches en las Jardines de Espana, the first movement of Concierto del Sur (Allegro moderato) and the last movement of Concierto para una Fiesta (Allegro moderato). The thematic motif in the mentioned works has the same sound material and rhythmic structure. Distinctive aspects of this motif specific to Andalusia have been investigated.

Background. The article deals with the choral creativity by the famous Ukrainian composer Mark Karminskyi. The weight of M. Karminskyi’s choral works in the legacy of the composer and in choral art in general stimulates research interest in this area of his activity. However, there are relatively few scientific studies that examine the composer’s choral work; most of them are aimed at reconstructing his general creative portrait or at examining other pages of his heritage. The scientific novelty of this research is determined by the comprehensive coverage of children’s choral creativity by M. Karminskyi and the consideration of his unpublished choral works. The research methodology, synthesizing analytical and generalizing approaches, is based on the traditions of national musicology and is determined by the specifics of vocal and choral genres, first of all, by the inextricable link between musical drama and text. The purpose of the article is to recreate the most complete picture of M. Karminsky’s choral work for children and to determine its role in contemporary choral performing. The results of the research. The composer’s early works were distinguished by meaningfulness, optimism, brightness of musical images, which was embodied in easy, convenient and accessible tunes. Many Soviet-era songs created for children of different school age were included in the “Songs for Students” collections as a new program material for choral singing of Ukrainian secondary schools students in music lessons. Several works of the author became known throughout the country and published in the leading music publishers in Kiev and Moscow: “What Boys Are Made Of” (lyrics by R. Burns translated by S. Marshak), “Quicker to the Gathering” (by L. Galkin), “Balloons” (lyrics by Ya. Akim). The songs about Victory in the Second World War are popular: “Victory is celebrated by the people” (S. Orlova), “The soldier has forgotten nothing” (E. Berstein), “Red Poppies” (poems by G. Pozhenyan). The composer combines his songs into vocal-symphonic suites. One of the main genre of choral creativity of the author has become a miniature that is able to absorb a variety of musical expressive means to expand and deepen the content of the work in a small area of the form. The works by M. Karminskyi revealed such features of choral miniature as philosophicity, attentive attitude to the word, its emotional and semantic meaning, which is reflected in the detailed development of the thematic material. Most of the composer’s choral works are written for a cappella choir. The collections of “Choral Notebooks” (1988) and “Road to the Temple” (1995) have reflected the artist’s thoughts for several decades. The figurative content of “Choir Notebooks” includes the lyrical states caused by contemplation of pictures of nature; the collection “Road to the Temple” represents philosophical reflections not only of a personal nature, but also thoughts about the universal problems of today. The cycles reveal the principles of the composer’s thinking and are one of the pinnacles of his creative heritage. The article looks at one of the best works of the cycle “Road to the Temple”, the choir “Remembering Drobitsky Yar” (lyrics by E. Yevtushenko) for children’s choir, soloist (tenor) and piano. Also, the article deals with unpublished choral works by M. Karminskyi “Paraphrases on the Sonata of Mozart” and “Guitar” on F. G. Lorka’s poems. In the work “Guitar” on Lorca’s poem (translated by M. Tsvetayeva), the composer uses signs of Spanish color: imitation of techniques of playing the guitar, rhythmic copyism of the castanets playing and other. The poetic text “decorated” by flexible, broad, expressive melody that gives words greater emotion. The piece is full of sharp changes of genre signs of melodic structures (vocal without text, dance, austinous repetitions) revealing the semantic implication of the poem. The basis of the “Paraphrase on the theme of Mozart’s Sonatine” was the fourth part (Allegro) of Sonatina No. 1 in C Major from the Six Vienna Sonatas by W. A. Mozart. M. Karminskyi noticed the vocal nature of many parts of this cycle and skillfully made a “translation” of one of them for the children’s choir. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he wrote music that does not fundamentally claim to be innovative. As a true professional, he pays attention to the integrity of the compositions elaborating the smallest details. He strives for the laconism of expression and, at the same time, is able to saturate the choral texture with modern expressive means, if the artistic image of the work requires it. Natural expressive intonation, intonation as emotional content of vocal language distinguishes choral music by M. Karminskyi. A special role in intonation is played by breathing, it is inextricably linked with melodic movement and energy. The breath of the melodies of the author is enriched by the lively intonations of the language, which reveal her “soul”, give a feeling of warmth, strength, caress, greatness, truthfulness. Musical form of the composer’s works is determined by the intonation of the music. Based on linguistic-vocal intonations, most of the author’s works have strophic forms that follow from the semantic aspect of the literary text. Karminskyi is a master of choral unison. This mean of expressiveness, which is not often used by composers, in Karminsky’s works is a carrier of expressive melodism and suppose the performance with a great inner feeling. Features of declamation always find a place in his choirs, they reproduce the living human language, the spiritual experiences of a man. Conclusion. The works for the children’s choir have a special purity and cordiality that is so subtly perceived by children. Mark Karminsky’s music is capable of drawing children’s attention to musical values that purify the soul and nurture personality. His music makes you think and feel! M. Karminsky’s creativity has forever entered the concert practice of children’s choirs of Ukraine.

Cities were the foundational cores of Western Civilization and, at least for westerners, civilization is still unthinkable without cities and urban networks. Inevitably cities have been one of the main tools used by Europeans to establish their colonial systems, starting with the first, the Portuguese and Spanish, in Early Modern times. This paper aims to highlight the role of Iberian colonizing processes as vehicles of European city planning culture.There are basically two large urbanistic pattern families for colonial towns: the orthogonal grid known since Ancient Greece, based on square blocks; and the sequences of long and narrow plots, systematically used in Europe since the beginning of the second millennium. The latter is more flexible and topographically more adaptable than the former. Both patterns are present in Europe, but also in the parts of the world that experienced European colonization.The Portuguese conveyed and developed the plot system in the remaining four continents, while the Spanish codified and carried the block one to the New World. That established a distinction that has been dissected for decades. However, when these two modes are regarded from a global perspective, they appear as two complementary and diverse aspects of the spread of European urbanistics rather than an opposition.The allegory taken from José Saramago’s famous novel The Stone Raft aims not only to give us an image of that European transfer of knowledge to the New World, but also to make us think about new research attitudes and goals around that extraordinary and long lasting legacy.

La dimensión alegórica está presente en prácticamente todo el teatro de Jesús Campos, no solo en el escrito durante el tardofranquismo sino también en el creado en democracia. Aunque esta característica lo vincula al llamado Nuevo Teatro Español, del que se ha dicho que emplea la alegoría como una estrategia frente a la censura y como reacción frente al realismo de la generación precedente, esta explicación no es suficiente para comprender ni la presencia de las formas alegóricas en el teatro de estos años ni en el de Campos en particular. En el caso de Campos, tras examinar la presencia de rasgos alegóricos en varias de sus obras, llegamos a la conclusión de que su empleo está íntimamente relacionado con su propia visión del mundo y con su idea de la creación artística.The allegorical dimension is present virtually throughout Jesús Campos’s theater, not only during the late stage of Francoism, but also in that created during the democratic era. Although this characteristic links him to what has been called New Spanish Theater, which has been said to employ allegory as a strategy to deal with censorship and as a reaction to the realism of the preceding generation, this explanation does not suffice to explain either the presence of allegorical elements in the theater of these years, nor in that of Campos in particular. In the case of Campos, after examining the presence of allegorical features in several of his works, we reach the conclusion that their use is closely related to his own vision of the world and idea of artistic creation.

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs infamously changed the law to read: “some animals are more equal than others” (108). From Charlotte’s Web to Babe, there are a plethora of contemporary cultural references, as well as expressions of their intelligence and worth, which would seem to support the pigs’ cause. However, simultaneously, the term “pig” is also synonymous with negative attributes—greed, dirtiness, disarray, brutality and chauvinism. Pigs are also used to name those out of favour, including police officers, the obese, capitalists and male chauvinists. Yet, the animal’s name is also used to express the most extraordinary and unlikely events as in “pigs might fly”. On the one hand, pigs are praised and represented as intelligent and useful, but then they are derided as unclean and slovenly. We are similarly paradoxical in our relationship with then, ranging from using them as a food source to keeping them as pets, and from seeing them as a valuable farm animal/resource or dangerous feral pest depending on which side of the farm gate they are on. Pigs also give a voice to many aspects of popular culture and feature in novels, fairytales, cartoons, comics and movies. As food, pigs are both for feasts and forbidden, their meat the site of both desire and disgust. They are smoked, roasted, fried, stewed and braised, and farmed in the worst of industrial food producing factories. They are also leading the charge in an eating revolution which is calling for heritage, free-range, organic and cruelty-free farming. Snuck into dishes during the Inquisition to expose false conversos, pigs are today seen by some as unclean, inedible and/or fattening and, yet, they provide the symbolic heart of tip-to-tail eating and some of the most expensive and desired of foodie products: heritage Spanish hams, for instance. In an age where to be slender is the goal of many, pigs have been bred and farmed to provide pork which is ever leaner, and yet, their fat—at its most unctuous and melting—is providing a space where the most celebrated of chefs revel. When more and more people are disconnected from what they eat, snout-to-tail eaters are dining on recognisable pigs’ ears, pig’s head filled pies and braised trotters. For many, pigs are the other white meat.Those of us who grew up with television muppet, Miss Piggy, are familiar with the mixed feelings that pigs can evoke. As the contributions to this issue attest, the idea of “pig” can evoke a similarly wide range of responses from scholars working in a variety of disciplines. While as editors we approached the idea of “pig” from an interdisciplinary food studies approach, the symbolic, and even iconic, significance of the pig is a central concern of all of the papers. As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it so elegantly “food has to be good to think as well as to eat” (1963: 128). A number of the authors in this issue have responded with a regional or country-specific focus, and include perspectives from, or about, places and cultures as diverse as Ireland, Tonga, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, the USA and China. “The Pig in Irish Cuisine and Culture”, the title and subject of Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire’s historical analysis, opens with the fact that more pork is eaten per capita than any other meat in Ireland but pigs themselves are almost invisible. Various themes confirm the importance of pigs in Irish culture—literature, folklore, the domestication of the animal and their value in household economics, their role in feasts and how they are raised, killed, prepared and consumed. How the history of the pig in Ireland complements that of the potato—the food item more widely recognised as a major contributor to Irish cuisine—is also included, as are an indication of the new interpretations of Irish pork and bacon dishes by contemporary chefs. In Tonga, conversely, pigs are killed to mark a special event, and are not eaten as everyday food by most people, although they are very significant in Tongan life and culture precisely because of this ceremonial importance. In “Pu‘aka Tonga,” ex-resident of Tonga Mandy Treagus, explains that this is one of the few things about the Tongan diet that has not changed since Cook visited the area and named it the “Friendly Islands”. Treagus also critiques the ways in which the Tongan diet has changed, and how food in Tonga is a neo-colonial issue with pervasive and, sometimes, negative ramifications for Tongans.Jeremy Fisher’s memoir “Tusk” similarly weaves personal and cultural history together, this time in New Zealand. “Tusk” orients the life story of the narrator’s father around the watershed moment he experienced when he killed a boar at 16. The tusks he took from the killing were mounted on gold and accompanied him throughout his life, as well as acting as a reminder to others of his act. The tusks thus function as a physical reminder of the night he spent out in the bush and killed the boar, but also a remembrance of both change and continuity over time. Jenny Smith moves us spatially, and temporally, to the Soviet Union in her “Tushonka: Cultivating Soviet Postwar Taste”. During the Second World War, the USA sent meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. However, after receiving several shipments of SPAM, a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka, was requested. Smith uses the example of tuskonka to trace how this pig-based product not only kept soldiers alive during the war, but how later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritised muscle over fat and influenced pig breeding programs. Smith asserts that this had a significant influence on faming and food processing in the Soviet Union, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer.Pigs are at the centre of debates that have arisen from the growth of a number of social movements that are becoming increasingly mainstream, reminding us that they are also alive, and beings in their own right. These movements include environmentalism, vegetarianism and other alternative food movements advocating ethical eating. Thus, in his analysis of alien creatures with pig and human features in the science fiction series Dr Who, “Those Pig-Men Things”, Brett Mills explores our reactions to these characters and their fates. Discussing why pig-human representations are capable of being both “shocking and horrific”, but also of arousing our empathy, Mills’s analysis suggests the possibility of more complex notions of human/non-human interaction. It also assists in working towards, as he states, “helpfully destabilis[ing our] simplistic ideas of the superiority of the human race.” The deepest form of human-animal interaction underlies Peta S. Cook and Nicholas Osbaldiston’s “Pigs Hearts and Human Bodies: A Cultural Approach to Xenotransplantation”. Cook and Osbaldiston discuss how our categorisation of animals as a lower species has enabled their exploitation, arguing how, in the contemporary West, we largely attribute “a sacred high value to human bodies, and a low, profane quality to animal bodies.” The authors provide a compelling account of the social and cultural ramifications of the use of pigs in xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation), a process in which the current “choice” animal source is pigs. The line dividing human and animal can at other times be a tenuous one, demonstrated by the anxiety generated over eating practices exposed in fears of eating “like a pig”. In her article, “Sugar Pigs: Children’s Consumption of Confectionery”, Toni Risson explains how rules about eating and concealing food in the mouth remind us that eating is an animal act that instruction is required to modify and control. Children’s lolly-eating rituals—sharing half-eaten food, monitoring the progress of its consumption and change, and using fingers to inspect this change or pull stuck lollies off teeth—can evoke disgust in adults, but can also create friendship networks, intimacy and a sense of belonging for children as they transgress the rules of civilised eating. As Risson puts it, as “the antithesis of civilisation, the pig is the means by which we understand ourselves as civilised beings, but the child with a lolly is an ever-present reminder that we may be animals after all”.Feminism can be added to this list of social movements, with Arhlene Ann Flowers drawing attention to the power of language in her article “Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?”. Flowers chronicles the linguistic battle between the presidential candidates in the US 2008 campaign over the colloquialism “lipstick on a pig”, used in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Flowers traces the history of this phrase, as well as the use of other porcine terms in political language including “pork barrelling” and “male chauvinist pig.”In her article about New York’s first gastrobpub, The Spotted Pig, one of the co-editors of this issue, Donna Lee Brien, has constructed a brief restaurant biography for the eatery famous for founding chef April Bloomfield’s nose-to-tail, locally sourced pork dishes. In this, Brien reflects upon the pig’s place in contemporary dining, whether as “raw foodstuff, fashionable comestible, brand, symbol or marketing tool.” In Lillian Ng’s novel, Swallowing Clouds, references to pigs are similarly closely related to food, but in her article, Spanish author Catalina Ribas Segura argues these references to flesh and meat evoke the concepts of freedom, transgression and desire. In “Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds”, Segura focuses on pork and the pig and what these reveal about the two main characters’ relationship. One of these, Zhu Zhiyee, is a butcher, which means that pigs and pork are recurrent topics throughout the novel, but other porcine expressions appear throughout. Pig-related terminology in the novel provides a means for Segura to consider the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, and includes a discussion about the connotations of pigs in Chinese culture, where pork is used in a variety of dishes. Lee McGowan’s “Piggery and Predictability: An Exploration of the Hog in Football’s Limelight” focuses in more closely on one of the uses to which we have put pigs, discussing how far “the beautiful game” of football (soccer) has come from the days when an inflated pigs bladder was used as the ball.Reversing this focus from use back to how we, as humans, relate to animals, can show that how we conceive of pigs in our human history reveals our own prejudices. It is known that pigs and humans have interacted for some 10,000 years. The history of that interaction and their own adaptability mean that pigs have a broad range of possible relationships with humans, wider and more complex than either that of many other species or our contemporary treatment of them would attest. The other co-editor of this issue, Adele Wessell, takes a historical perspective to restore pigs to the centre of the narrative in “Making a Pig of the Humanities.” Drawing on a growing body of work on nonhuman animals, Wessell is interested in what a history of pigs and our relationship with them reveals about humans more generally. She argues that all the significant themes in modern history—production, religion, the body, science, power, the national state, colonialism, gender, consumption, migration, memory—can be understood through a history of our relationships with pigs. Jim Hearn is a chef, a researcher and writer. Hearn’s article “Percy” is the story of a pig who, as the only pig in the farmyard, longs to “escape the burden of allegory”. All Percy wanted was to belong, but his pig-ness caused offence to all the other animals in the farm. Percy’s story is about belonging and identity, body-image and representation, told from a pig’s point of view. Percy is burdened with the layers of meaning that have built up around pigs and longs to escape, and this fable provides a fitting ending to this issue.Together, we hope the articles in this collection indicate the wide significance and large number of meanings of “pig” that are possible for different cultures and across historical periods, and the place that pigs inhabit in our national, popular and food cultures. They reveal how pigs are used and misused, as well as how they are understood and misunderstood. These interesting and diverse articles also show how pigs are both material and allegorical; how they are paradoxical in how they are revered, avoided and derided; and, commonly, how they are eaten. ReferencesOrwell, George. Animal Farm. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library—Library Society, 2004.Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Boston, Beacon Press, 1963.