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Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired. The term picaresque describes a specific set of early modern Spanish narratives relating the life story of a lowborn adventurer in a realist, ironic, and often humorous manner. The protagonist, the picaro or pícara (rascal), seeks upward mobility in a resolutely hierarchical society determined to prevent his - or her - ascent, and both are rich targets of satire. Spanish pícaros inspired Anglo-French rogues includi...
An important contribution to the study of women writers. María de Zayas is unique in the seventeenth century as the only Spanish woman to write a collection of exemplary novels whose quality is often compared to Miguel de Cervantes’ masterful works. Her two main collections of short stories, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos, encompass a social critique based on literary fiction that exposes flaws in the idealized archetypes of masculine identity in early modern Spain. Zayas’s stories redefine women’s patriarchal disadvantage as a tool to expose the ways in which early modern Spanish women could be empowered to counteract men’s discursive and political authority...
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how their history can shed new light on contemporary global dilemmas. With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, and based on archival research carried out across seven countries, Odious Debt studies 400 years of history and unearths overlooked congressional debates and understudied thinkers. The book shows how discussions on the morality of debt and default played a structuring rol...
A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of commu...
In 1570's New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia), a new generation of mestizo (half-Spanish, half-indigenous) men sought positions of increasing power in the colony's two largest cities. In response, Spanish nativist factions zealously attacked them as unequal and unqualified, unleashing an intense political battle that lasted almost two decades. At stake was whether membership in the small colonial community and thus access to its most lucrative professions should depend on limpieza de sangre (blood purity) or values-based integration (Christian citizenship). A Tale of Two Granadas examines the vast, trans-Atlantic transformation of political ideas about subjecthood that ultimately allowed some colonial mestizos and indios ladinos (acculturated natives) to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards in colonial Santafé de Bogotá and Tunja. In a spirit of comparison, it illustrates how some of the descendants of Spain's last Muslims appealed to the same new conceptions of citizenship to avoid disenfranchisement in the face of growing prejudice.
This book traces the emergence and early development of segregationist practices and policies in Spanish and Portuguese America - showing that the practice of resettling diverse indigenous groups in segregated "Indian towns" (or aldeamentos in the case of Brazil) influenced the material reorganization of colonial space, shaped processes of racialization, and contributed to the politicization of reproductive sex. The book advances this argument through close readings of published and archival sources from the 16th and early-17th centuries, and is informed by two main conceptual concerns. First, it considers how segregation was envisioned, codified, and enforced in a historical context of cons...
Arms and Letters is the first study in English dedicated to the literary and cultural analysis of early modern Spanish military autobiographical texts.
Reveals how ordinary subjects in the New World aided and abetted law-making in the Spanish Empire.
The Friar and the Maya offers a full study and new translation of the Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán (Account of the Things of Yucatan) by a unique set of eminent scholars, created by them over more than a decade from the original manuscript held by the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. This critical and careful reading of the Account is long overdue in Maya studies and will forever change how this seminal text is understood and used. For generations, scholars used (and misused) the Account as the sole eyewitness insight into an ancient civilization. It is credited to the sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan, monastic inquisitor, and bishop Diego de Landa, whose legacy is complex a...
In Picaresque Fiction Today Luigi Gussago examines the development of the picaresque in contemporary Anglophone and Italian fiction. Far from being an extinct narrative form, confined to the pages of its original Spanish sources or their later British imitators, the tale of roguery has been revisited through the centuries from a host of disparate angles. Throughout their wanderings, picaresque antiheroes are dragged into debates on the credibility of historical facts, gender mystifications, rational thinking, or any simplistic definition of the outcast. Referring to a corpus of eight contemporary novels, the author retraces a textual legacy linking the traditional picaresque to its recent descendants, with the main purpose of identifying the way picaresque novels offer a privileged insight into our sceptical times. Cover illustration by Eugene Ivanov "Night Airing", 2007.