Recovering voices long relegated to silence, The Lives of Women deciphers the responses of women to the culture of control in seventeenth-century Spain. In this new history of Inquisitional Spain, Lisa Vollendorf incorporates convent texts, Inquisition cases, biographies, and women’s literature to reveal a previously unrecognized boom in women’s writing between 1580 and 1700. . During this period, more women wrote for the public book market and participated in literary culture than ever before. In addition, the rise in convents and female education contributed to a marked increase in texts produced by and about women in religious orders. Vollendorf argues that, in conjunction with Inquisition and legal documents, this wealth of writing offers unprecedented access to women’s perspectives on life in early modern Spain, and that those perspectives encompass diverse ethnic backgrounds and class differences. Many of the documents touch on issues of sex and intimacy; others provide new ways of understanding religious practice in the period. Perhaps most important, these writings give a richly textured view of how women reacted to the dominant culture’s attempts to define, limit, and contain femininity. Vollendorf shows that the texts reflect a shared preoccupation with redefining gender and creating legitimate spaces for women. As The Lives of Women vividly illustrates, hundreds, if not thousands, of women’s stories await rediscovery in archives. The book provides a roadmap for understanding the experiences and concerns of wives, widows, sisters, and daughters who lived in a key moment in the development of the Spanish nation and the Hispanic world. At its core, The Lives of Women argues for a reconceptualization of history, one that will rely on the experiences of women and minorities as much as on the words and actions of kings and conquistadors.

Luso-Brazilian Review publishes interdisciplinary scholarship on Portuguese, Brazilian, and Lusophone African cultures. It is the oldest and most prestigious U.S. academic journal in its field, with articles on social science, history, and literature by leading scholars.

The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.

Naciones Intelectuales explores the processes and works that laid the foundations of a new literary modernity in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. It focuses on the period from the signing of the Constitution in 1917, to the death of Alfonso Reyes in 1959, and analyzes the four elements of Mexican cultural practices: the notion of literature, the figure of the intellectual, the creation of academic institutions, and the definition of national identity that emerged through the various debates held by leading figures of the period. The book analyzes different key moments, controversies, and cultural interventions, which ultimately led the diverse aesthetic spectrum created by the revolution into becoming a highly institutional system of literature. This book offers a cartography of Mexican literary institutions unprecedented in scope, which will allow readers, students, and scholars to understand the construction of modern Mexican literature in a clear, rigorous, and systematic way.

This volume, which includes essays on Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia, and literature written by African immigrants, focuses on issues of "difference" that are at the center of current debates in Spain and elsewhere--the emergence of minoritized literatures, multilingualism and identity, new relationships between culture and institutions, the negotiation of historical memories, the connections between migrations and the redefinition of nationhood, and the impact of global trends on local symbolic systems.

Nuevo Texto Crítico is an academic publication sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center of Latin American Studies at Stanford University. Since its foundation in 1988 Nuevo Texto Crítico has been recognized as a leading journal in the fields of analysis and criticism of Latin American literature and film. One of its main objectives has always been to bring both to the educated and the general reader the best critical materials at the highest level of research, as a means of understanding how modern culture develops in every Latin American country in national and trans-national ways.

This broadranging exploration argues that there was a special preoccupation with the nature and limits of poetry in early modern Spain and Europe, as well as especially vigorous poetic activity in this period. Contrary to what one might read in Hegel, the "prosification" of the world has remained an unfinished affair.

Michael Iarocci traces the ways in which Spain went from being central to European history and identity during the early modern period to being marginalized and displaced by England, France, and Germany during the Romantic period. He points out that it has long been an unspoken assumption tainting much of literary criticism that Spain did not have a strong Romantic movement even though Spain itself had come to be viewed by the "new" Europe as the location of all that was romantic. Through a close study of Cadalso, Saavedra, and Larra, Iarocci argues that Spanish writers were intensely concerned with the same issues taken up by more famous Romantics and that the ways in which they address these issues provides us with a richer notion, not only of Spain, but of all of Europe.

Zafra considers legal measures and moral treatises that define the boundaries of sin. Her analysis discusses the lesser evil that the presence of prostitutes represents for society, as well as, the concern for the public good that led to its legal eradication in 1623. Zafra's research demonstrates that the discourse on early modern prostitution present in literary and extra-literary sources informs us of more than the sexual practices allowed to prostitutes, and therefore, is part of a larger discourse on the regulation of women's behavior. She points out that moralists, preachers, legislators, and writers participated in this on-going discourse on prostitution, women, and sex.

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).