Instable Puente: La construccion del letrado criollo en la obra de Juan de Espinosa Medrano is the first complete study of the life and works of this 17th century Peruvian priest who is considered today the most significant letrado criollo (creole man of letters). In particular, the book focuses on how Juan de Espinosa Medrano composes an ensemble of texts (a treatise on poetry, theater, and several sermons) that demonstrates his ability to master the European literary code, while simultaneously undermining the supposed natural preeminence of Spanish intellectuals over the...

In 1526 Emperor Charles V arranged the wedding of Ferdinand of Aragon, the dethroned heir of Naples, to Germana de Foix, the widow of Ferdinand the Catholic, and appointed them viceroys of Valencia. In the decade that followed, these two royal personas invited some of the best poets and musicians to their Valencian palace with the purpose of recreating the aulic life that they had enjoyed in their youth. In Ilusion aulica e imaginacion caballeresca en El Cortesano de Luis Milan, Ignacio Lopez Alemany applies the concept of "soft power" created by George Duby and Norbert Elias to...

The Triumph of Brazilian Modernism studies the first steps of the movement in Brazil and some of its texts. Its first part explains how modernists produced a meta-discourse that legitimized their own work, and how state cultural policies assured their canonization by disseminating overviews, anthologies, and histories of Brazilian Modernism throughout the educational system. From the 1950s onwards, Brazilian criticism and historiography incorporated many of these self-legitimizing arguments into a totalizing narrative of triumph and maturity of Brazilian literary...

In Etnografia, politica y poder a finales del siglo XIX: Jose Marti y la cuestion indigena, Jorge Camacho traces the development of Jose Marti's ideas about progress, the market, and the educational reforms carried out by liberal governments in Central America, Argentina, and the United States at the end of the 19th century. Unlike previous work in the area that tends to focus on Marti's famous essay "Our America," Camacho shows his support of laws and military acts that were very detrimental to the Indians during this time. Among these acts were Julio Roca's genocidal "campaign" in...

The promotion of state ideology was pervasive in early modern Spain and its New World colonies. One cultural medium affected, theater--the most popular and viable form of mass entertainment at the time--frequently played a role in the advancement of imperial rule. However, despite censorship and the state control of theaters, early modern dramatists also found novel and covert methods to criticize Spain's handling of its imperial affairs by proposing alternative solutions to the problems with which they dealt.

Imperial Stagings: Empire and Ideology in Transatlantic Theater of...

Claude Monet was not only the creator of what we now view as French Impressionist painting, he was also its last major practitioner. By the time he passed away in 1926, he had outlived all the other painters--Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, and the others whom we now group together under that heading. Yet when Andre Suares, one of the four directors--along with Gide, Valery, and Claudel--of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, summed up the movement that year, he did not give Monet pride of place. Rather, he wrote, "Far more than Sisley, Claude Monet, or the Goncourt brothers,...

Mapping the Landscape, Remapping the Text: Spanish Poetry from Antonio Machado's Campos de Castilla to the First Avant-Garde (1909-1925) explores the mapping of identity and memory in Antonio Machado's (1875-1939) Campos de Castilla (1912, 1917) before studying its disruption by the avant-garde movements Ultraismo (1918-1925) and Creacionismo (1910s-1930s). Machado's attribution of identity to the landscape was remapped by the first avant-garde in order to circumvent the placement of identity in textual landscapes that are coded as national or regional, transform the conception of...

Has Chilean author Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) written the final word on Latin America's insufferable modernity? This investigation asserts that Bolano's novels, short stories, poetry and essays examine to a point of exhaustion the most important aspects of Latin America's modern literary tradition. Bolano's critique of modernity as a violent historical condition is a radical mode of literary articulation. With it, the current models of criticism--world literature, the global novel, postcolonial and transatlantic studies--are undermined, while the very notions of margin and center are...

Histeresis creativa traces how courtly spectacles, short and full-length plays, and picaresque narratives arose under Philip III of Spain, and were then adopted by popular culture. The book focuses on some of the most prominent writers of the early, middle, and late Baroque (Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Alonso de Castillo Solorzano) but considers their works through the optic of creative hysteresis, i.e., the artistic appropriation of the past to defend the present. The prestige system under Philip III was in need of justifying the imbalance between the increasing...

This is a critical study of the construction of gendered spaces through feminine labor and capital in Puerto Rican literature and film (1950-2010). It analyzes gendered geographies and forms of emotional labor, and the possibility that they generate within the material and the symbolic spaces of the family house, the factory, the beauty salon and the brothel. It argues that by challenging traditional images of femininity texts by authors and film directors like Rosario Ferre, Carmen Lugo Filippi, Magali Garcia Ramis, Mayra Santos-Febres, Sonia Fritz and Ana Maria Garcia, among others, contest...