After an introductory survey of the development of women's studies in the context of Spain, twenty-one chronologically ordered essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, Spain and Mexico explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present. The essays of the first half examine the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representation or self-representation of women in a broad sweep of texts including medieval folksong, hagiography, and painting of the Baroque era. The modern...

Co-winner of the 2013 inaugural Publication Prize awarded by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland The aftermath of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983) has traditionally been associated with narratives of suffering, which recall the loss of the 30,000 civilians infamously known as the -disappeared-. When democracy was recovered, the unspoken rule was that only those related by blood to the missing were entitled to ask for justice. This book both queries and queers this bloodline normativity. Drawing on queer theory and performance studies, it develops an alternative...

This book examines six Cuban novels published between 1991 and 1999, all part of the new -boom- of the Cuban novel in the 1990s. It analyses how in undermining monolithic representations of reality these texts employ discursive techniques that question absolute truths, defy established boundaries of literary genres and challenge concepts of national, gender and individual identity. The authors studied in this book---Reinaldo Arenas, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Abilio Estevez, Daina Chaviano, Yanitzia Canetti, and Zoe Valdes---are placed beyond the dichotomy of outside and inside Cuba in order to...

There has been a widely-held consensus among historians that the Moriscos of Spain made little or no attempt to assimilate to the majority Christian culture around them, and that this apparent obduracy made their expulsion between 1609 and 1614 both necessary and inevitable. This book challenges that view. Assimilation, coexistence, and tolerance between Old and New Christians in early modern Spain were not a fiction or a fantasy, but could be a reality, made possible by the thousands of ordinary individuals who did not subscribe to the negative vision of the Moriscos put around by the...

Of all the differentiated regions comprising contemporary Spain, Galicia is possibly the most deeply marked by political, economic and cultural inequities throughout the centuries. Possibly due to the absence of a nationally aware local bourgeoisie and the enduringly colonial structures informing Spanish-Galician economic and cultural relations, processes of national construction in the region have been patchily successful. However, Galicia's cultural distinctness is easily recognisable to the observer, from the language spoken in the region---the contemporary variant of old...

Carmen Martin Gaite produced a large body of work in various genres over the course of her five-decade career, though she is primarily known as a novelist, short story writer, and social commentator. Her work at times reflects, and at times defies, the pattern of development in Spanish fiction since the 1950s. This Companion offers a re-reading of Martin Gaite's works, emphasizing her early experimentalism which culminated in mid-career works (notably El cuarto de atras), and stressing how, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the majority of Spanish novelists were engaged in a critique of...

This volume brings together twenty-six essays from the world's leading scholars and practitioners of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Examining the startlingly wide variety of ways that Spanish comedias have been adapted, re-envisioned, and reinvented, the book makes the case that adaptation is a crucial lens for understanding the performance history of the genre. The essays cover a wide range of topics, from the early stage history of the comedia through numerous modern and contemporary case studies, as well as the transformation of the comedia into other dramatic genres, such as films, musicals,...

Este libro explora la representacion de la mujer moderna en los ensayos y la ficcion de Federica Montseny (1905-1994), lider anarquista espanola de gran prominencia en las decadas de 1920 y 1930. Se examinan en profundidad sus escritos sobre la cuestion de la mujer a la luz de las premisas filosoficas que sustentan el ideario del anarquismo. Ademas, su ficcion mantiene un complejo dialogo con los discursos cientificos y culturales de genero que proliferaron durante las primeras decadas del siglo XX. La mujer moderna de Montseny no consiste en una figura unica, finalizada y estatica, sino que...

This work offers an alternative insight into the longstanding and conflicting relationship between politics and the (gay) intelligentsia in Cuba by looking closely at political texts, film, documentaries and literature from prior to Fidel Castro's regime until the present day. The book offers new readings of the work, letters and interviews of two influential voices, Reinaldo Arenas and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Arenas's material reveals a new account of the nature of 'the voice of the invisibles' and the key elements of the construction of a Cuban national rhetoric that looks at (governmental)...

Domus aborda ejemplos de la dramaturgia y la narrativa corta del siglo XVII espanol en tanto formas esteticas que respondieron al desarrollo del mundo domestico nobiliario y urbano de la Peninsula Iberica. Propone un recorrido por el terreno de lo habitable, incluyendo la arquitectura y decoracion interior de la casa, las dinamicas de genero, la economia domestica y la utilizacion de los objetos, la luz y el espacio, deteniendose en aspectos historicos que transformaron el hogar de la temprana modernidad asi como tambien la imaginacion creativa de los autores barrocos. Este estudio senala que...