Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature focuses on the intersection of food and humor across several medieval narrative genres. This book is a part of the Purdue Studies in Romance Literature Series.

While Victor Hugo's lasting appeal as a novelist can in large part be attributed to the unforgettable characters that he created, character has been paradoxically the most criticized and least understood element of his fiction. Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo provides readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances that characterize both Hugo's novel writing and the nineteenth-century French novel, and will thus appeal to the specialist and non-specialist alike.

Radical Theatricality argues that our narrow search for extant medieval play scripts depends entirely on a definition of theater far more literary than performative. This literary definition pushes aside some of our best evidence of Spain's medieval performance traditions precisely because this evidence is considered either intangible or un-dramatic (that is, monologic). By focusing on the dialogic relationship that inherently exists between performer and spectator in performance -rather than on the kind of literary dialogue between characters traditionally associated with drama- Radical...

The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked diverse political reactions, but the imminence of the ruins triggered a collective historical awakening. In Cities in Ruins, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Enjuto Rangel's study investigates the virtually unexplored map of modern ruins in modern...

First-person narrative does not always fall under the genre of autobiography. In the centuries before the genre was defined, authors often patterned their personal narratives after prestigious discourses, such as hagiography, historiography, and the literary miscellany. Caballero noble desbaratado: AutobiografA-a e invenciA3n en el siglo XVI Noble Knight Disrupted: Autobiography and Invention in the Sixteenth Century] analyzes several first-person narratives from Spain and the conditions of their writing and reception. It focuses on the sixteenth-century Libro de la vida y costumbres Book...

Is Brazil part of Latin America or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra AmA(c)rica: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think. This book charts Brazil's evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic JosA(c) Enrique RodA3, Brazilian...

Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto GonzAlez EchevarrA-a, RenA(c) Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, first, to his theory, and second, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando PA(c)rez's book undertakes a critical approach to...

In her book, The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature, Rebecca Riger Tsurumi captures the remarkable story behind the changing human landscape in Peru at the end of the nineteenth century when Japanese immigrants established what would become the second largest Japanese community in South America. She analyzes how non-Japanese Peruvian narrators unlock the unspoken attitudes and beliefs about the Japanese held by mainstream Peruvian society, as reflected in works written between l966 and 2006. Tsurumi explores how these Peruvian literary giants, including Mario...

Emilia Pardo BazAn's place in Spanish and Galician literatures has been hard won, and she has yet to receive the recognition she deserves. In GA(c)nero, naciA3n y literatura: Emilia Pardo BazAn en la literatura gallega y espaAola, Carmen Pereira-Muro studies the work and persona of this fascinating author in the context of Spanish and Galician competing nationalisms. She rereads the literary histories and national canons of Spain and Galicia as patriarchal master narratives that struggle to assimilate or silence Pardo BazAn's alternative national project.Pereira-Muro argues that Pardo BazAn...

Women's voices routinely have been muted or omitted entirely when a nation assembles its historical narrative. In Miradas Transatlanticas: El periodismo literario de Elena Poniatowska y Rosa Montero, Alicia Rita Rueda-Acedo examines the relationship between the journalistic and literary work of the two writers named in the title as they utilize a distinct combination of journalism and fiction to create new spaces where women's voices and experiences may be situated prominently in their nations' historical narratives.Rueda-Acedo analyzes the works of the two writers from the perspectives of...