Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity (mostly under duress) in late medieval Spain. "Converso and Moriscos Studies" examines the manifold cultural implications of these mass convertions.

In Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature, Mehl Allan Penrose examines three distinct male figures, each of which was represented as the Other in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The most common configuration of non-normative men was the petimetre, an effeminate, Francophile male who figured a failed masculinity, a dubious sexuality, and an invasive French cultural presence. Also inscribed within cultural discourse were the bujarrón or ’sodomite,’ who participates in sexual relations with men, and the Arcadian shepherd, who expresses his desire for other males and who takes on agency as the voice of homoerotica. Analyzing journalistic essays, poetry, and drama, Penrose shows that Spanish authors employed queer images of men to engage debates about how males should appear, speak, and behave and whom they should love in order to be considered ’real’ Spaniards. Penrose interrogates works by a wide range of writers, including Luis Cañuelo, Ramón de la Cruz, and Félix María de Samaniego, arguing that the tropes created by these authors solidified the gender and sexual binary and defined and described what a ’queer’ man was in the Spanish collective imaginary. Masculinity and Queer Desire engages with current cultural, historical, and theoretical scholarship to propose the notion that the idea of queerness in gender and sexuality based on identifiable criteria started in Spain long before the medical concept of the ’homosexual’ was created around 1870.

Runner-up for the 2017-18 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize This book examines how anxieties about colonial power and national identity are reflected in Spanish literature, journalism, and photography of Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures during the Spanish colonisation of Northern Morocco from 1909 to 1927. This understudied period, known as the Rif War, is highly significant because of its role in shaping the identities that came into conflict in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Furthermore, the book makes a key contribution to Spanish colonial studies by offering a comparative analysis of Spanish representations of the Iberian Peninsula's cultural and historical relationship with Moroccan Muslims and Jews in this context, showing how conflicting visions of Spanish identity are portrayed through and in relation to them.

The Iberian Peninsula has always been an integral part of the Mediterranean world, from the age of Tartessos and the Phoenicians to our own era and the Union for the Mediterranean. The cutting-edge essays in this volume examine what it means for medieval and early modern Iberia and its people to be considered as part of the Mediterranean.

As striking as its beautiful landscapes, New Mexico's culture is also endlessly complex. The fourteen essays collected here examine many sides of Nuevomexicano culture: its treatment of the sacred, its discourses on identity and difference, its historical and literary legacy from colonial times to the present. Among the diverse topics considered are the role of Charles Fletcher Lummis in romanticizing New Mexico; the importance of Spanish-language newspapers at the turn of the century and their commitment to the social, educational, and cultural progress of the Spanish-speaking population of the Southwest; the role of mutual aid societies as agents of collective action and cultural adaptation and survival; the cultural and religious importance of captivity narratives; popular depictions of the Virgin of Guadalupe; and the history of textile making in north central New Mexico. A photo essay by renowned documentary photographer Miguel Gandert explores the blurring of lines between Spanish and Indian cultures in the Rio Grande Valley. Working within and across disciplines, charting relationships between geography and culture that have informed the state's history, and placing empirical, philosophical and scholarly materials in dialogue with regional, historical, and cultural studies, the contributors to this volume add immeasurably to knowledge of New Mexico's cultural history.

Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

This collection of essays explores cultural phenomena that are shaping global identities in contemporary Spain. This volume is comprised of twenty essays that examine literary, documentary, and film representations of the multicultural configurations of Spain. All of the essays treat multiculturalism in Spain, focusing on reconfigured Spanish cities and neighborhoods through Latin American, African, and/or Eastern European migrations and cultures. Principal themes of the volume include urban space and access to resources, responses to the economic crisis, emerging family portraits, public versus private spaces, the local and the global, marginalities, migrations, and public expression of human and civil rights. This project examines the intercultural exchange that takes place in recent productions against an imaginary homogeneous Spanish national identity. These films, documentaries, and narratives seek to unsettle the Spanish preconceptions of the “Other(s).” Therefore, these texts construct a hybrid concept of the nation in which perceived national identities can be altered by interactions with other cultures from a broader world. The originality of the work lies in its focus on contemporary Spanish literature, documentaries, and fictional film to foment exploration of how Spanish cities, big and small, are experiencing transformation in architecture, popular customs and festivals, economics, family dynamics, and social and political agency through the arrival of new residents from across the globe. Some of the essays question the very legitimacy of the term ‘multiculturalism,’ others examine the formation of new communities, and still others explore the changes in religious representations and the environmental effects of the tourist industry. Together, the essays offer a compelling portrait of the changing face of contemporary Spain.

This innovative volume offers fresh perspectives and directions on the intersection of Hispanic and Jewish studies. It shows how 'Jewishness' has played a crucial role in Spanish political, social, and cultural developments in the modern era, exploring the effects of the multiple material and symbolic absences of Jews and Judaism from modern Spanish society. The book considers the haunting presence that this absence has entailed. Contributors analyze the different and contradictory ways in which Spain as a nation has tried to come to terms with its Jewish memory and with Jews from the nineteenth century to the present: José Amador de los Ríos’ efforts to incorporate 'Jewishness' into the canon of Spanish national literature and history; the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the figure of the Jewish conspirator who seeks to foment revolutionary unrest in novels from Spain, Italy and France; the development of philosephardism and its interconnections with anti-Semitism, Spanish fascism and colonial ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century; the instrumentalization of the Spanish Jewish past during the Second Republic; the role of philosemitism in the development of Catalan nationalism; and the relationship between the memory of Sepharad and Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Spain. This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain’s nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de la Torre y Sevil became equal agents of the sweeping ontological reconfiguration of the idea of eros that defined their culture. Such reconfiguration includes: the troubling displacement of "self" and "other" seen in sentimental genres like the pastoral or romance; the overlapping of emotions such as love and jealousy characteristic of the baroque lyric and dramatic production; and the conflation of axioms such as eros and eris prevalent in contemporaneous epic experiments. In uniting the findings of often surprising texts, the collection of essays in Goodbye Eros takes a pioneering look at how Golden Age moral, ideological, scientific, and literary discourses intersected to create fascinating re-elaborations of the trope of love.