Tales of Seduction

Don Juan is one of the most intriguing creations of Western literature, a perpetual source of fascination. In the popular imagination he exists as a legendary seducer of women, a trickster and transgressor of sacred boundaries. Crossing cultures from east to west, he has been the recipient of countless revisions, while the twentieth century has viewed the figure afresh through the prism of its own cultural terms of reference and social concerns. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Tales of Seduction focuses on the fascinating intersections between myth, culture and intellectual inquiry. Sarah Wright takes Don Juan back to Spain and examines the confluences of Spanish culture with aspects of Western intellectual history (such as medicine, psychoanalysis and linguistics), where she finds Don Juan continues to transgress the limits of culture until the present.