The essays collected in A Rich Field Full of Pleasant Surprises have been written by a number of lecturers from different Spanish universities in order to offer a picture of the current state of affairs in English Studies, covering the areas of Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Globalization and Media, Film, Music, and Crime Fiction, among others. The essays comprised in this volume tackle theoretical issues as well as practical cases, showing the vitality and scholarly rigour of all kinds of literary and cultural manifestations worldwide, particularly within a European framework. The title of the book gives expression to the innovative and inspiring teaching of Professor Socorro Suárez Lafuente, to whom the collection is dedicated.

Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made Corín Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain’s Barbara Cartland or France’s Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry. The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Uncommon Alliances: Cultural Narratives of Migration in the New Europe takes a critical stance toward both assimilationist and multicultural imaginings of community in the European Union that occlude neocolonial relations of dependence and exclusion.

One of the wonders of the universe we live in is the Milky Way. It spans the entire sky and can be seen every night of the year from anywhere on Earth. This is the first book that deals specifically with what can be seen within the Milky Way from a practical observer's point of view. Astronomy of the Milky Way covers every constellation that the Milky Way passes through, and describes in detail the many objects that can be found therein, including stars, double and multiple stars, emission nebulae, planetary nebulae, dark nebulae and supernovae remnants, open and galactic clusters, and galaxies. It also describes the one thing that is often left out of observing guides - the amazing star clouds of the Milky Way itself. It is one of a two-volume set that deal with the entire Milky Way - this second volume looks at what can be seen predominantly from the Southern skies In addition to the descriptive text there are many star charts and maps, as well as the latest up-to-date images made by observatories around the world and in space, as well as images taken by amateur astronomers. Equipped with this book, an amateur astronomer can go out on any clear night of the year and observe the galaxy we live in - The Milky Way.