Hispanic Texts – serie

The Spanish novella La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidadeswas published anonymously in Alcalá de Henares, Burgos and Antwerp in 1554. It is most famous as the book establishing the style of the picaresque satirical novel.

"This excellent edition is most welcome. A select bibliography, a brief vocabulary, several footnotes to explain points of difficulty, fourteen long endnotes... and even the music of the songs, make the edition an extremely valuable and interesting volume, offering the reader the text of the play itself and important new insights into its structure, its significance and indeed its success."Professor Leo Hickey, 'Modern Languages'Bodas de sangre is arguably the best-known work by the most celebrated of all twentieth-century Spanish writers. A passionate story of family feud and tragic elopement is played out in the setting of a poor country village, building up to a dramatic ending full of the intensely poetic symbolism characteristic of Lorca.

Gabriel García Márquez has been described as the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes, and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba is considered to be one of his best works. This reflective and atmospheric novel is set in a small Colombian town where the frustrated and stubborn Colonel, a veteran of the 'War of a Thousand Days', is still, after thirty years, waiting for the letter authorising payment of his war pension.The old soldier and his wife mourn the brutal killing of their only son, and the story of their struggle against poverty and sickness culminates in the Colonel's defiant refusal to part with his cherished fighting cock, however serious the consequences.The moving narrative pays tribute to the resilience of human nature and man's will to survive in the face of heavy odds. The novel also throws light on the turbulent religious and political troubles in Latin America.Now revised to include an updated chronology and bibliography, Giovanni Pontiero's acclaimed critical edition provides English-speaking students with an introduction to, and notes on the text, and a selected vocabulary.

Completed only two months before the author's execution in Granada at the age of thirty-eight, La casa de Bernarda Alba marks the completion of Lorca's 'trilogia de la tierra española' and is commonly held to be his greatest play. The theme of vitality and repression that runs as a leitmotif through his writings takes on a clearer social dimension in the 'drama de mujeres en los pueblos de España', with the presentation of a household of five unmarried daughters tyrannised by their mother's excessive concern with social class and obscurantist village morality.

"Requiem per un campesino espanol" was first published under the title Mosen Millan in Coleccion Aquelarre,Mexico, 1953. The present text follows the first Spanish edition published by Destino, Barcelona, 1974, which bears a few minor variants, mainly in paragraph structure. It has been reprinted a number of times and translated into many languages and is one of the most widely read Spanish texts in the 20th century. This edition is aimed primarily at sixth-formers and university undergraduates and the introduction and notes have been compiled in the light of recent socio-politial topic-based syllabuses and communication studies courses. The inclusion in the introduction of a substantial section on the now out-of-print "Contraataque" (1937), the wartime narrative which contains the germ of the post-war novel, is intended to provide the student with a context for the study of the process in Sender's writing inspired by the Civil War - from explicit militant propaganda penned in the heat of battle to implicit poetic parable, historical emotion recollected in the comparative tranquillity and distance of exile. It is hoped that such a juxtaposition will illuminate both the content and literary achievement of "Requiem".

One of the core authors of the '60s boom in Latin American fiction, Julio Cortázar made a contribution of international importance to the development of the short story as a literary form. This collection spans his writing career and includes La Noche Boca Arriba and Final del Juego (1956), Las Babas del Diablo (1959), La Isla a Mediodia (1966), Recortes de Prensa and Queremos Tanto a Glenda (1981) and Botella al Mar (1982).Of the seven stories, some are famous examples of his contribution to the genre of 'fantastic' literature, while others demonstrate his social and political concerns.Cortázar can be a challenging and demanding writer. Peter Beardsell's edition, with its comprehensive introduction and notes to the text, selected vocabulary and discussion section suggests that he is also enjoyable and accessible to readers at all levels.

The second of Lorca's trilogy of rural dramas, Yerma, is a blend of contrasting moods through which Lorca charts the increasingly destructive obsession of a childless young country wife, and probes the darker zones of human fears and desires. The play's rich mode of expression - a combination of verbal, visual and auditory images and rhythms - is also geared to celebrating sexual attraction and fertility, creation and procreation.Through his characterization of the play's central figure, Lorca raises the question of women's social status - a controversial question both then and now, and one to which Robin Warner pays particular attention in his critical introduction to the play. He also examines the links between the dramatic structure of Yerma and the importance of cultural politics during the course of the Second Spanish Republic. The Spanish text is supported by an introduction and notes in English, as well as by an extensive vocabulary and section of discussion questions.

If one had to identify one central, defining text from modern Mexican culture, it would be Octavio Paz´s famous essay, El laberinto de la soledad. This fully annotated edition includes the complete text in Spanish (with the author’s final revisions), and notes and additional material in English. The editor’s introduction contextualizes the essay and discusses central features: autobiographical and textual origins, intellectual sources, reception and canonization, generic ambiguity, structure, and governing symbols. The intellectual sources identified range from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to the more contemporary ones of the French College of Sociology (Caillois), the Surrealist movement, the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, previous essays from writers in Mexico (such as Samuel Ramos) and Latin America. Several lines of interpretation are examined to show how the work can be read as a psycho-historical essay, an autobiographical construct or a modern literary myth. Transdisciplinary by nature, this literary essay is both an imaginative construction of personal and national identity, and also a critical deconstruction of dominant stereotypes. It seeks to redefine the complex relationships that exist between psychology, myth, history and Mexican culture. This edition also includes excerpts of the author’s opinions on his essay, a time-line of Mexican history, a selected vocabulary, and themes for discussion and debate. Paz’s first full-length prose work remains his most well-known and widely read text, and this edition will appeal to sixth-form and university students, teachers, researchers and general readers with a knowledge of Spanish.

Crónica del alba is a novel by Sender with a Civil War background, like the popular Réquiem por un campesino español, also in this series. The author evokes his childhood in rural Aragón at the beginning of the twentieth century in a book which has a charm and something of the character of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The young Pepe fights to believe in himself as a hero in the face of a world, and a father bent on putting him down. He is supported by his girlfriend, Valentina, who believes in him implicitly and often ends up in as much trouble as him. But there is something more here than scrapes and mischief-making. It is written by an older and disillusioned Pepe who has known real heroism and is now detained in a prison camp for Spanish Civil War refugees in southern France. The novel raises challenging questions about the loss of hope, how people cope with disillusionment, and the place of writing in that process. Moreover, since the novel reflects Sender’s own childhood it sheds light on the complex relationship of fact and fiction in autobiographical novels.

This tale of a slave's unrequited love for the woman who owns him is set in nineteenth-century colonial Cuba and was the only feminist-abolitionist novel published during the century in Spain or its colonies. This unique text raises important issues concerning power, race, gender and class in colonial societies, colonial and post-colonial subjectivity and identities, feminist appropriations of the abolitionist agenda, human rights discourse, and literary and philosophical issues associated with enlightenment thought. This new annotated critical edition is the first to provide the original Spanish text along with a substantial and authoritative introduction in English, as well as maps and tables relating to nineteenth-century Cuba, a vocabulary list, and suggestions for further reading.

El Caballero de Olmedo is a history play, a retelling of a folk talk, a celebrated piece of Golden Age drama, and also an intense mediation upon the power of desire, the deceits of eroticism and literary convention, the injustice of a world obsessed with appearance, and the tragic potential inherent in the courting of beautiful women. The introduction sets this play within the context of Baroque eroticism and sexual mores as well as dramatic practice. The text is presented with glosses to words unfamiliar to undergraduate students; the notes comprise summaries of acts and scenes from a dramatic point of view, and in-depth notes to problematic passages in the text, written with an undergraduate readership in mind.

Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) is the most widely read and best loved book of poetry ever written in Spanish. Its verses can be recited by heart by millions of Latin Americans from every background and walk of life, and it has become almost a bible for young lovers.Yet despite, or perhaps because of this immense popular success, it has received scant attention from scholars, often being studied out of context and in relatively superficial fashion. This new critical edition – the first to include critical notes in English – argues that the book constitutes a critical juncture in the young Neruda’s development as a poet, and that the poems are as much painstakingly wrought experiments in style, language and form as they are outpourings of youthful passion. A detailed introduction in English demonstrates that the Viente poemas represent the culmination of complex and sometimes fraught poetic apprenticeship, significant traces of which can be found in the poems themselves. This is followed by a series of commentaries which offer close readings of all twenty-one poems, an extensive bibliography, a selected vocabulary, and a list of key rhetorical and metrical terms.

Carmen Conde is a major figure in twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Though neglected up to now, Mientras los hombres mueren is the most important collection of war poetry to emerge from the Spanish Civil War. It was first published, in a limited edition, in Italy in 1953. Though it has been included in its entirety in anthologies of her work published in Spain in 1967, 1986 and 2007, this is the first free-standing edition since 1953 and the first ever critical edition. The collection was written in 1938–39, in Valencia, then the seat of the Republican Government. In prose poetry densely packed with imagery of nightmarish destruction, Conde gives voice to the experience of women and children suffering bombardment from air and sea, hunger and homelessness, and the loss of husbands, brothers and fathers at the front. The second half of the collection, ‘A los niños muertos en la guerra’, is an extended elegy for all those children killed in bombing raids during the war. This edition will be of interest to students and scholars of the Civil War and lovers of Spanish poetry in general.

This poem-by-poem guide to Lorca’s Romancero gitano was prompted by the need for some form of guidance to the overwhelming amount of critical material published on the book, the relative neglect or misunderstanding of certain poems and a concern to counter a recent tendency to eccentric interpretation.Herbert Ramsden’s comprehensive collection of commentaries will be useful both for students and teachers and for the Lorca specialist. With each poem the author offers a brief introduction to relevant background material, a comprehensive commentary, a brief indication of interpretations notably different from his own and a select critical bibliography. In a more general bibliography, the author lists a number of translations of Romancero gitano into English and a selection of commentary-based studies. The great diversity and allusive richness of Lorca’s poetic masterpiece demands more space than a compact student edition allows, and all serious students of Romancero gitano will want to use Herbert Ramsden’s Eighteen commentaries alongside his simultaneously-published edition of the text.

Lorca is one of the outstanding poets of Spanish literature, and apart perhaps from his trilogy of stage tragedies, "Romancero gitano" is his most celebrated work: innovative, sophisticated, difficult and uniquely popular. Partly, no doubt, it is the appeal of his gypsies, childlike and magical, oppressed by the world around; partly too, the work's elemental concerns: machismo, honor, sex, betrayal, revenge, bloodshed, death; partly also, the many echoes of Andalusian popular culture: horsemen and smugglers, fiestas and local saints, legends and superstitions, ballads and deep song. By its dramatic dynamism, its subtle stylisation and its mythical stature, Romancero gitano is one of the most appealing books of poetry in Spanish literature--but it is also one of the most difficult. In his introduction to this edition for English-speaking students, Ramsden considers briefly Lorca's "Double break with the past" and then concentrates on the "Romancero gitano" itself, with emphasis on the interplay of immediate appeal and wider resonances. An annotated select bibliography and select glossary are provided with explanatory end notes offering practical guidance, both linguistic and interpretative.

Upon entering the Royal Spanish Academy in 1975, Miguel Delibes delivered an address which reclaimed El camino (1950) for the emerging Green movement. With a blend of hilarity, satire, pathos and tragedy, Delibes artfully explores the process of crossing boundaries in pursuit of maturity and social advancement, whilst also implying that real education is the unfolding of the human heart among friends and sweethearts within a shared social and natural space.This new annotated version of the text comprises an introductory essay discussing green issues, attitudes towards the Spanish peasantry under Franco, and the function of the novel’s subtly orchestrated comedy. It also contains explanatory notes on the text, discussion topics and an extensive Spanish-English glossary.This edition is intended primarily for English-speaking students of Spanish literature and culture at school and university.

This Biography of a runaway slave is arguably the best-known book to have been written and published in revolutionary Cuba, being the testimonial narrative of Esteban Montejo, a former slave, runaway, and soldier in the Cuban wars of independence. The text is the collaboration between ethnographer Miguel Barnet and Montejo, the result of three years of tape-recorded interviews, transcribed, edited and annotated by Barnet. Montejo provides a first-hand account of slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba – the language, religion, music, and customs – and describes life in the sugar plantations and mills and as a runaway slave. Montejo’s text also covers key historical moments, from slavery to Abolition, the Ten Years War, the Spanish American War, and US intervention in the new republic.Reflecting the growing interest in Latin American and Cuban Studies, this student edition includes the complete text in Spanish, notes in English, a time-line of Cuban history and themes for debate and discussion. The extensive introduction focuses on three main areas: an overview of Cuban history featuring slavery, wars of independence and the new republic; an overview of the genre of the testimonial narrative as it emerged as an important literary style in revolutionary Cuba; and an analysis of the relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the publication of the text. There is also an extensive bibliography.

One of the threads that runs through Elena Poniatowska’s oeuvre is that of foreigners who have fallen in love with Mexico and its people. This is certainly the case of Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela - a brief novel (so short it was originally published in its entirety in Octavio Paz’s literary magazine Vuelta). The Russian exile and painter Angelina Beloff writes from the cold and impoverished post-war Paris to Diego Rivera, her spouse of over ten years. Beloff sends these letters to which there is no response during a time when the emancipation of women has broken many of the standard models and the protagonist struggles to fashion her own. Elena Poniatowska has (re)created these letters and within them one finds the unforgettable testimony of an artist and her lover during the valuable crossroads of a new time when Diego Rivera was forging a new life in his native country. In this edition, Nathanial Gardner comments on the truth and fiction Poniatowska has woven together to form this compact, yet rich, modern classic. Using archives in London, Paris and Mexico City (including Angelina’s correspondence held in Frida Kahlo’s own home) as well as interviews from the final remaining characters who knew the real Angelina, Gardner offers a mediation of the text and its historical groundings as well as critical commentary.This edition will appeal to both students and scholars of Latin American Studies as well as lovers of Mexican Literature and Art in general.

El castigo sin venganza (1631) is Lope de Vega's greatest tragedy. The play dramatises the story of the adulterous relationship between the beautiful Casandra, Duchess of Ferrara, and her step-son, Federico, and the reaction of her husband, the Duke, himself a flawed and ambiguous figure. The dramatist, at the height of his powers, re-works an earlier Italian short story to explore the complexities of human desire and the grim consequences of giving in to temptation. Aimed principally at undergraduates who are new to Spanish Golden Age drama, this edition includes a substantial commentary on the text, explanatory footnotes and a selected vocabulary. The introduction sets the play in its contexts - historical and dramatic - and focuses too on elements of the genre with which new readers might be unfamiliar: performance norms, the poetry of the play and the linguistic differences in Golden Age Spanish.It is informed by up-to-date scholarship on the play from Spain and the Anglophone world.

This edition is aimed at students, teachers and researchers alike. It presents an alternative reading of this seminal collection of poems. Unlike other editions, the introduction and the notes to the poems are in English, with an extensive vocabulary at the end. Cardwell specifically situates the poet in a special context: his early intellectual formation in his family, in the Institución Libre (the only secular school in Spain at the time), in the Symbolist circles of Paris and, most importantly, in the ferment of ideas of the young artistic circles of the new century, especially the Helios group of 1903–04. This environment served to shape the intellectual and poetic vision of Soledades. Galerías. Otros Poemas. Thus the poet’s maturing vision is traced over nearly three decades, highlighting how the burning intellectual ideas and ideals of the day, together with the poet’s own spiritual crisis, shaped and were articulated in this major collection of the period.

Spanish contemporary poetry: An anthology presents a selection of Spanish peninsular poetry from the 1970s to the present day, with an introductory study of the most relevant poetic trends and poetic groups of the period, followed by guided and close readings of each poem. The anthology includes poems by twenty-two authors selected according to their literary rigour and with attention to the relevance of their work, a comprehensive introductory study, notes, thorough individual commentaries to the poems, and lists of selected vocabulary and rhetorical terms that provide accessibility to the anthology. The poetic selection is divided into sections and subsections in order to aid its pedagogical intent, covering: the poetry written during the transition to democracy; the emergence of poetry written by women in the 1980s; the Spanish poetic field of the 1990s; the poetry written at the turn of the new millennium; and some of the youngest voices in Spanish poetry today. English-speaking students working in the field of Hispanic literature, but also a more general reader keen on literature written in Spanish language, should thoroughly enjoy this work.

This is an annotated critical edition of Artículos de costumbres by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37), presented with a critical introduction, study guide, glossary and chronology. Larra is still one of the most widely studied Spanish Romantic authors, and his satire of customs and manners in articles such as El castellano viejo, Vuelva usted mañana and Nochebuena de 1836 offers an insight into nineteenth century Spanish culture, while probing issues that are still seen as defining of Spanish identity today. Artículos de costumbres, presented here with an extensive annotation that identifies references that have not been previously elucidated, is a central text in the Spanish canon, opening up questions about modern Spain and issues such as political revolution, class identities, social change and the inclusion of Spain within European modernity.

Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932), an influential journalist, socio-political activist, and a key literary figure in the cultural ferment of pre-war Madrid, is currently being rediscovered, having languished in a long and regrettable oblivion during the Franco years. This scholarly edition of three stories by de Burgos includes the unabridged texts, vocabulary, notes, chronology, bibliography, 'temas de debate y discusión', and a critical introduction. Confidencias is the fictional diary of a young woman, describing her first adulterous relationship and exploiting the narratological possibilities of the diary form. La mujer fría is a vampire story featuring perhaps the very first pitiable vampire, or at least one of the earliest examples of this type, whilst ingeniously maintaining undecidability as to whether the protagonist is supernatural. Puñal de claveles narrates a wedding-day elopement. Inspired by the real-life 'Crimen de Níjar', Federico García Lorca drew on both stories for his Bodas de sangre.

Tristana is a novel where love, hate and power converge into a triangle of domination and frustration.Galdós', following the ideas of the Free Teaching Institution, intervened in the arena of the debate around the emancipation of women and their incorporation into the public sphere. Tristana, a young woman subjected to the rule of the tyrannical Don Lope, idealistically tries to find her purpose on life but she ends trapped by the rules of a world dominated by men who only see her as the object of their desire. Written in an experimental manner that defies the boundaries of theatre, epistolary and novel genres, Galdós' displays the purest nature of his characters by presenting their contradictions, weaknesses and virtues. He uses a deliberately ambiguous style that seeks to address fundamental questions regarding the unbalances of a Madrid in times of turbulence, but leaves the reader to draw their own meaning.