This book examines mannerism and baroque in the poetry of Tristan L'Hermite, a leading lyric poet of the seventeenth century. After presenting a history of scholarship on both the mannerist and baroque styles, James Shepard offers a definition of each as it applies to seventeenth-century lyric poetry. He then turns to Tristan's works, examining the poems contained in the Plaintes d'Acante et autres ouvres, Les Amours, La Lyre, and the Vers heroiques; his religious poetry; La Renomme; and his recently discovered poems.

Shepard reveals Tristan's...

In a time when few women in Europe were educated and even fewer spoke out against the status quo, Maria de Zayas (1590-?) published novellas filled with criticism about gender relations. Her best-selling Novelas amorosas (1637) and Desenganos amorosos (1647) explore the pleasures and, more frequently, the perils of sex and marriage. Condemned as lewd, Zayas's work was excised from the literary canon by nineteenth-century scholars. But with the feminist revolution of the 1970s came a renewed interest in her fiction. Zayas's contemporary appeal is easily explained: through graphic...

The first book-length study of the role of farce in Spanish American theatre explores the intersection of politics and drama. Spanish American playwrights have realized that farce's "lack of power" and marginality can become a resourceful way to confront aggression and censorship, while rejecting the possibility of eventually becoming part of the oppressive center. This book underscores the tendency of Spanish American farce for self-parody, its capacity to uncover and also carry out a profound critique of their nations' artistic, social, and political rituals. To use and transgress farce...

Reeser proposes a definition of gender in which moderation and masculinity are inextricably linked. The book begins with a reading of this brand of masculinity in Aristotle and then proceeds to textual analyses of canonical and non-canonical writers of the Renaissance, such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Erasmus, L ry, and Artus.

Jean-Jacques Poucel provides a comprehensive introduction to the poetry and novels of Jacques Roubaud, a prominent member of the French experimental group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature). Drawing from a variety of literary theories, Poucel argues that the Oulipian practice of writing under constraint provides a new vehicle for literary memory, one that strengthens the terms by which poetic traditions are condensed, transformed, and transmitted. In addition to situating the importance of Roubaud's work within a broad contemporary context,...

The "I" of History: Self-Fashioning and National Consciousness in Jules Michelet examines the poetics of the historian's self-portraiture as it intersects with the nation and history. History exists because someone tells the story. In Michelet's unique staging and performance of the past, the way the story is told is the story. Long before Charles de Gaulle, Michelet asserted that he "was" France. His self-representation as the "I" of the nation and the embodiment of history ("moi-histoire") takes form as a rhetorical personification that shapes the historian's writing as it informs...

An in-depth examination of the cultural functions of the pastoral in Spain, this study of Montemayor's La Diana and Cervantes's pastoral texts moves away from studies that consider this literature as purely escapist and imitative. Rosilie Hernandez-Pecoraro considerably expands the discussion on the importance of the pastoral genre to early modern Spanish studies and supplements the ways in which these texts have conventionally been considered by Hispanists.

In this study of Andre Gide's magnum opus, Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Karin Nordenhaug Ciholas argues for the novel's thematic unity.

In this book, Thomas Spaccarelli argues that the Escorial codex usually published and studied as nine separate saints' lives and romances is in fact a unified and organized whole. He shows how the codex is intimately related to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and to the religious, literary, and artistic traditions associated with it. The Libro was produced by a team of compilers, who chose and translated specific French works with the goal of providing edification and encouragement to Spanish-speaking pilgrims. Spaccarelli elucidates the Libro's ideology of pilgrimage,...

This book investigates three examples of the turn-of-the-century essay in Spain and Latin America: Angel Ganivet's Idearium espanol (1897), Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (1900), and Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909). Michael Aronna traces the reactions of these historically and rhetorically related colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the new economic, cultural, social, and political challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how concepts of sexual degeneration, racial inferiority, immaturity, and gender prominent in contemporary...