Miguel de Cervantes conceived his final work, The Labours of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story (1617), as a great prose epic that would accomplish for its age what Homer and Virgil had done for theirs. And yet, by the eighteenth century Don Quixote had eclipsed Persiles in the favour of readers and writers alike and the later novel is now virtually forgotten except by specialists.

This study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an...

From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxieties in the selected narratives of four women writing in French - Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne H?bert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women's works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general...

A particular model of masculine desire has traditionally been evoked in an effort to understand the subordinate role of women in male-authored fiction. Because of this, the belief that male-authored texts are unfailingly built upon the denial of feminine difference has come to dominate many aspects of literary studies. "Surfacing" the Politics of Desire re-examines the "myths" of masculine desire in order to challenge this premise, placing literature at the centre of recent feminist debates over the ontology and politics of sexual difference.

Citing examples of textual...

Beginning in the 1980s and gathering force in the last decade of the twentieth century, Moroccan women writers have become the latest group of Middle Eastern women to break their silence by writing both fiction and non-fiction. The Myth of the Silent Woman examines representative French-language texts from Moroccan women writers. Suellen Diaconoff situates these works in a discourse of social justice and reform, arguing that they contribute to the emerging national debate on democracy and help to create new public spaces of discourse and participation.

In novels and short...

Juan Rana, the most famous actor of the Spanish Golden Age, enjoyed a long and successful career from 1617 to 1672. Over fifty entremeses - interludes featured between the main acts of full-length plays - were written especially for him by some of the most important playwrights of the period. This bilingual and annotated edition of The Outrageous Juan Rana Entremeses translates a selection of the entremeses for the first time, highlighting their literary complexity and providing historical context for the many double meanings and innuendos they contain.

Rana's arrest for...

In early modern Spain, the strict definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman of Catholic faith for the sole purpose of procreation became a key strategy in the production of Spain's version of empire, the Universal Catholic Monarchy. Mar?a M. Carri?n argues that popular Spanish theatre questioned this marital prescription by staging subjects that were strictly regulated or prohibited by the crown. Theatre audiences in Spain saw different representations of marriage: women arguing in court against marital violence, queens and noblewomen delaying or refusing imposed marriages,...

The Persistence of Presence analyzes the relationship between emblem books, containing combinations of pictures and texts, and Spanish literature in the early modern period. As representations of ideas and ideals, emblems are allegories produced in a particular place and time, and their study can shed light on the central cultural and political activities of an era.

Bradley J. Nelson argues that the emblem was a primary indicator of the social and political functions of diverse literary practices in early modern Spain, from theatre to epic prose. Furthermore, the...

The noble wives in Mar?a de Zayas's Desenga?os suffer terrible fates: one is beheaded, another poisoned, one is cemented into a chimney, while yet another is locked into a tiny wall closet where she dies. The hallmark of Zayas's aesthetics, these characters are the central reason why her fiction has increased in popularity through the ages. Yet their stories pose an apparent contradiction between the author's pro-female rhetoric and her gusto for killing model women, then beautifying their mutilated cadavers.

Dressed to Kill reconciles Zayas's Desenga?os...

When confronting twentieth-century political oppression and violence, writers and artists in Portugal and South America have often emphasized the complex relationship between freedom and tyranny. In Seeing Politics Otherwise, Patricia Vieira uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interrelation of politics and representations of vision and blindness in Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and art.

Vieira's discussion focuses on three literary works: Graciliano Ramos's Memoirs of Prison, Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, and Jose...

Postcolonial Counterpoint is a critical study of Orientalism and the state of Francophone and postcolonial studies, examined through the lens of the historical and cross-cultural relations between France and North Africa. Thoroughly questioning the inability of Western academia to shake free of universalism and essentialism and come to grips with the Orientalism within postcolonial discourse, Farid Laroussi offers a cultural tour d'horizon which considers Andre Gide's writing on Algeria, literature by French authors of Maghrebi descent, and the conversation surrounding...