Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Spanish & Portuguese

During the years since his death, Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain's best-known twentieth-century poet and playwright, has generally been considered a writer of tragedy. Three of his major plays are fatalistic stories of suffering and death, and his poetry is filled with dread. Yet most of Lorca's dramatic production consists of comedies and farces. Throughout his poetry and prose, as well as in his most somber plays, runs an undercurrent of humor--dark irony and satire--that is in no way contradictory to his tragic view of life. On the contrary, as Virginia Higginbotham demonstrates, through...

Satire, the use of criticism cloaked in wit, has been employed since classical times to challenge the established order of society. In colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, many writers used satire to resist Spanish-imposed social and literary forms and find an authentic Latin American voice. This study explores the work of eight satirists of the colonial period and shows how their literary innovations had a formative influence on the development of the modern Latin American novel, essay, and autobiography.

The writers studied here include...

Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and elsewhere. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them The Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater.

In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex,...

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...