Modernismo, Latin America's first homegrown literary movement, has garnered critical attention for its political and social import during a time of intense nation building and efforts to propel the region into modernity. LaGreca's Erotic Mysticism explores two dominant discourses of the period, Catholicism and positivism, which sought to categorize and delimit the desires and behaviors of the ideal citizen. These discourses, LaGreca argues, were powerful because each promised to allay the individual's existential fears. Yet the coexistence of these two competing ideologies, one atheist...

Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (1664-1743), a writer of early eighteenth-century viceregal Peru, believed that his epic poem Lima Fundada (1732), in tandem with Historia de Espana Vindicada (1730), were his crowning literary achievements. His instincts have proven correct. However, in spite of the fact that Lima Fundada is Peralta's most cited work, it has not been published in its entirety since it appeared. For the first time in more than 280 years, Slade and Williams have edited the entire poem, including all of its original paratexts, introductory compositions, prologue,...

Reading, Performing, and Imagining the Libro del Arcipreste examines how reading, writing, and interpretation reside at the core of the cultural history of the Castilian Libro del Arcipreste (often called the Libro de buen amor) from the moment of its creation in the first part of the fourteenth century. The study comprises three sections. In the first, the author situates the Libro within the tradition of Augustinian hermeneutics and exegetics, relating the work to the schools at Toledo and Salamanca. The detailed argument makes notable connections between...

Materia medica explores the intersection of the sciences and humanities in Spanish sixteenth and seventeenth century representations of the extraordinary within the larger scheme of the Baroque. Medical and chirurgical treatises, discourses, letters, broadsheets, and paratexts of the period share with the humanities thought processes, methods, patterns, and--most importantly--some forms of description. Archival evidence broadens the spectrum of these texts, and cases are frequently compared to similar instances in disciplines such as theology, literature, and the...

Drawing on feminist psychoanalysis and Greek mythology, La madre muerta explores how matricide and unconscious matricidal fantasies have been portrayed in Spanish narrative, drama, and film. The book examines individual and social perceptions regarding gendered subjectivity, the operation of power relations, gender violence, and the economies of desire. It provides a comparative study of different theoretical approaches to matricide and a close reading of five films--Furtivos (1975) by Jose Luis Borau, Sonambulos (1978) by Manuel Gutierrez Aragon, La madre muerta...

Bernart de Ventadorn was a twelfth-century Catalan poet and troubador. These forty-one poems, filled with nostalgia, joy, and tenderness, were written between 1150 and 1180. This edition, with notes and a complete glossary, contains the original texts accompanied by the only English translations available at the time of publication.

In 1253, this collection of fictional tales was translated from Arabic into the language of thirteenth-century Spain. It is one of the purest surviving representatives of a group of stories generally called the Book of Sindibad and is probably one of the most direct descendants of the long-lost original.

This general chronology of Voltaire's letters by an eminent "Voltairiste" contains a chronological appendix, followed by a bibliography and an index.

This volume contains an introduction and translation into English of six poems by Geffroi de Paris, the fourteenth-century French writer and author of Chronique metrique de Philippe le Bel, or Chronique rimee de Geoffroi de Paris. A glossary of proper names is included.

This critical, annotated essay is followed by appendices on painters in French fiction and selected paintings by them. A descriptive bibliography is also included.