Offering a fresh, revisionist analysis of Spanish fiction from 1900 to 1940, this study examines the work of both men and women writers and how they practiced differing forms of modernism. As Roberta Johnson notes, Spanish male novelists emphasized technical and verbal innovation in representing the contents of an individual consciousness and thus were more modernist in the usual understanding of the term. Female writers, on the other hand, were less aesthetically innovative but engaged in a social modernism that focused on domestic issues, gender roles, and relations between the sexes. Compared to the more conventional--even reactionary--ways their male counterparts treated such matters, Spanish women’s fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was often revolutionary. The book begins by tracing the history of public discourse on gender from the 1890s through the 1930s, a discourse that included the rise of feminism. Each chapter then analyzes works by female and male novelists that address key issues related to gender and nationalism: the concept of intrahistoria, or an essential Spanish soul; modernist uses of figures from the Spanish literary tradition, notably Don Quixote and Don Juan; biological theories of gender prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s; and the growth of an organized feminist movement that coincided with the burgeoning Republican movement. This is the first book dealing with this period of Spanish literature to consider women novelists, such as Maria Martinez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos, and Concha Espina, alongside canonical male novelists, including Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and Pio Baroja. With its contrasting conceptions of modernism, Johnson's work provides a compelling new model for bridging the  gender divide in the study of Spanish fiction.

Essays in this volume explore the popular cultural effects of rock culture on high literary production in Spain in the 1990s.

"...Unamuno often entertains a view of the universe as an enormous system of embedded and embedding forms, structures nested within other structures in seemingly endless series." -From The Great Chiasmus In The Great Chiasmus, Paul R. Olson explores the use of the chiasmus in the work of Miguel de Unamuno. The chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases, appears on a variety of levels, from brief microstructures ("blanca como la nieve y como la nieve fria"), to the narrative structures of entire novels, and even, Olson suggests, to encompass the stages in Unamuno's novelistic work. Olson's close readings of the texts in terms of this structure lead to observations on Spanish history, events in Unamuno's life, the psychological dimensions of his characters, and the authorial self found within his texts. The Great Chiasmus shows us how Unamuno uses grammar to reflect apparent contraries as freely reversible and thus identical. In this connection, Unamuno explores concepts usually considered opposites-spirit and matter, word and flesh.

Essays focus on Baroque as a concept and category of analysis which has been central to an understanding of Hispanic cultures during the last several hundred years

The Hispanic Review is a quarterly journal devoted to research in Hispanic literary and cultural studies. Published since 1933 by the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, the journal features essays and book reviews on the diverse cultural manifestations of Spain and Latin America, from the medieval period to the present.

What does literature reveal about a country’s changing cultural identity? In History, Violence, and the Hyperreal by Kathryn Everly, this question is applied to the contemporary novel in Spain. In the process, similarities emerge among novels that embrace apparent differences in style, structure, and language. Contemporary Spanish authors are rethinking the way the novel with its narrative powers can define a specific cultural identity.

This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives.

Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Bringing together contributions from top specialists in Hispanic studies - both Peninsular and Latin American - this volume explores a variety of critical issues related to the historical, political, and ideological configuration of the field. Dealing with Hispanism in both Latin America and the United States, the book’s multidisciplinary essays range from historical studies of the hegemonic status of Castillian language in Spain and America to the analysis of otherness and the uses of memory and oblivion in various nationalist discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. Wide-ranging though they are, these essays are linked by an understanding of Hispanism as a cultural construction that originates with the conquest of America and assumes different intellectual and political meanings in different periods, from the time of national cultural consolidation, to the era of modernization, to the more recent rise of globalization.