Dr Pring-Mill is one of the most eminent Calderon scholars, and this volume demonstrates the development of his critical thinking over a period of some forty years. The essays, collected in one volume for the first time, and fully revised and updated, include his classic exposition of the critical method for which he coined the term analisis tematico-estructural', and his comparison of Calderon's approach to the different media of auto and comedia. As a whole, the volume makes a major contribution to the study of Spain's greatest dramatist on the eve of his fourth centenary. BR>Spanish...

Pablo Neruda was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century but his work is extremely uneven. There is a view that there are two Nerudas, an early Romantic visionary and a later Marxist populist, who denied his earlier poetic self. By focussing on the poet's apprenticeship, and by looking closely at how Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, this Companion tries to establish what should survive of his massive output. By seeing his early work as self exploration through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct experience, the...

A Companion to Lope de Vega brings together work by leading international scholars on the life and writing of Lope de Vega Carpio, the 'fenix de los ingenios', a 'monstruo de la naturaleza', as he was described by his rival, Miguel de Cervantes. Spain's foremost Golden Age playwright was in addition a major artist in prose and poetry, genres also covered by the Companion. The contributions evaluate current critical debates and issues in Lope de Vega studies, as well as providing new readings of key texts. The volume attempts to do justice to the variety, profusion and originality of Lope's...

Daring, innovative, controversial, often satirical, a dramatist ahead of his time, Ramon del Valle-Inclan (1866-1936) was one of Spain's 'Generation of 1898', and an influence on such later movements as the Theatre of Cruelty and the Theatre of the Absurd. Lima's study first examines Valle-Inclan's day-to-day involvement with the theatre as actor, director-dramaturg and playwright. This is followed by an account of Valle-Inclan's full-length and one-act plays, which demonstrate the foibles and follies of human behaviour, and are discussed here under a variety of thematic headings. There...

The works of the twentieth-century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) are characterised by their fragmentary and disunified nature, with a wide range of complexities and contradictions. Concentrating on the well-known "La Realidad y El Deseo", Dr McKinlay considers the poems from the perspective of the widespread loss of faith in God, exploring the tension between Cernuda's perception of chaos and desire for order, which co-exist in dialectical opposition. Neil C. McKinlay is college lecturer in Spanish at New College, Oxford.