Oxford Hispanic Studies – serie

Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain is a wide-ranging discussion on women's writing and representations of gender in Spanish literature and culture from the Romantic period to the fin de siècle.It is customary to regard gender roles and representation in nineteenth-century Spain as polarized and predictable. But in this volume, leading scholars from the UK and USA discuss not only patriarchal emphasis of Spanish culture, but also demonstrate that this was a period in which relations between men and women were being constantly negotiated, challenged, and redefined as part of an on-going transformation of political and national identities. Contributions look at women's writing and the representation of women in canonical texts, the construction of both femininity and masculinity, issues of race and region, and popular fiction, journalism, and the visual arts. All quotations are given in Spanish and in English translation.Lively, challenging, and theoretically sophisticated, Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain provides a much-needed overview of the Spanish cultural production in the most decisive of centuries.

What came after Neruda and Vallejo? This is the first book to answer that question, presenting the new movements in Latin American poetry since 1950. Eight poets are selected, with substantial excerpts from their work and parallel translations in English: the test for inclusion is whether their writing expands the possibilities of poetry. Some - for example Juan L. Ortiz, Nicanor Parra, Gonzalo Rojas, Ana Enriqueta Terán - reached maturity well before mid-century, but have continued to explore new poetic expression in the decades since; the younger generation of poets chosen includes Ernesto Cardenal as well as lesser-known figures: Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Carmen Ollé, and Raúl Zurita. Together they display the new forms and languages of poetry which have been emerging in contemporary Latin America. Revealing the freshness of the poems, as they invite new perceptions of the world and of language, is paramount in this study. Its method is to bring together poetics with cultural studies, presenting detailed readings of the work of each poet, as well as exposition and discussion of their poetics, especially where they grapple with the tensions between the inner self and history in the later twentieth century.

This is a major new study of the films of Luis Bunuel, surrealist scourge of the bourgeoisie and enduring influence on European cinema. Uniquely, the book offers an extended analysis of Buñuel's films in the context of contemporary debates in film studies, focusing in particular on questions of subjectivity and desire. Throughout, Buñuel's films are viewed as both the brilliant, subversive expressions of the director's fantasies and obsessions and as reflections of wider cultural norms and preoccupations. Making use of psychoanalysis and gender theory, Peter Evans explores Buñuel's characteristic thematics of transgression and his status as exile or outsider. The whole range of his work is discussed, from the critically neglected `bread and butter' Mexican melodramas of the 1950s to such classics of European cinema as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire, and Belle de Jour. Accessible, lively, and compelling, The Films of Luis Buñuel provides a much-needed revaluation of one of the world's greatest film-makers.

Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema provides the first detailed consideration of women directors working before the Civil War and during Franco's dictatorship, and is the first to explore the impact of feminism on filmmaking in Spain. Part I focuses on three directors, Rosario Pi, Ana Mariscal, and Pilar Miró, whose careers span the history of sound cinema in Spain. The book highlights their struggle to achieve agency within the male-dominated film industry, and draws upon extensive archival research as well as in-depth textual analysis to reveal their negotiation with questions of authorship, female subjectivity and national cinema. Part II explores six films by women and men directors–three each from the Francoist and post-Franco periods–that foreground a number of issues of fundamental importance to feminism, from the indoctrination and 'performance' of gender, to the fraught effort to reconcile power with sexual pleasure. The Afterword treats the remarkable recent boom in women directors and traces the shift in their work towards the exploration of multiple forms of difference.

Two sets of related issues prompt this study: the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the rise of the Cervantine novel in Spain. The conquest, exploration, and colonization of the Indies resonate through Cervantes's two novels, Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the Persiles (1617), both fortified by imperialism. Cervantes begins publishing in the 1580s, just as the might of imperial Spain turned from Europe towards the Atlantic. Twice refused emigration papers to America - which he depicts as the 'refuge and haven of all the desperate men of Spain' - Cervantes turns to fiction. His novels internalize many colonial discourses and at least four genres implicated in Spain's New World enterprise: the Books of Chivalry, the utopias, the colonial war epic, and American ethnohistory. The first full-length study to move beyond an inventory of Cervantes's references to the Indies - to Mexico and Peru, cannibals and tobacco, parrots and alligators - this book interprets his novels as a transatlantic, cross-cultural, and multi-linguistic achievement.