The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.

An identification and analysis of Spanish Golden-Age drama's preoccupation with the woman who will not accept marriage as her natural role.

Some writers present her as a representative of the symbolic order: invested with sacred powers and ultimate authority, she rebukes transgressors and negotiates their return to God's grace and lawful society."--Jacket.

The history of women in early modern Spain is a largely untapped field. This book opens the field substantially by examining the position of women in religious, political, literary, and economic life. Drawing on both historical and literary approaches, the contributors challenge the portrait of Spanish women as passive and marginalized, showing that despite forces working to exclude them, women in Golden Age Spain influenced religious life and politics and made vital contributions to economic and cultural life. The contributors seek to incorporate the study of Spanish women into the current work on literary criticism and on the intersection of private and public spheres. The authors integrate women into subfields of Spanish history and literature, such as Inquisition studies, the Spanish monarchy, Spain's economic and political decline, and Golden Age drama. The essays demonstrate the necessity and value of incorporating women into the study of Golden Age Spain.

This book maps the field of seventeenth-century women's writing in Spanish, English, and French and situates the work of Sor Juana more clearly within that field. It holds up the multi-layered, proto-feminist writings of Sor Juana as a meaningful lens through which to focus the literary production of her female contemporaries. Merrim's book advances the integration of Hispanic women authors and women's issues into the panorama of early modern women's writing and opens up unexplored commonalities between Sor Juana and her sister writers. Early modern women writers whose works are explored include Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, St. Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish. Merrim's study provides a full-bodied picture of the resources that the cultural and historical climates of the seventeenth century placed at the disposal of women writers, the manners in which women writers instrumentalized them, the building blocks and concerns of early modern women's writing, and the continuities between early modern and modern women's writing. Written in an engaging, clear manner, this innovative study will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to scholars in early modern studies, women's studies, history, and comparative literature.

The plays are in Spanish. Los papeles están en el español.

This collection of original new essays focuses on the many ways in which early modern Spanish plays engaged their audiences in a dialogue about abuse, injustice, and inequality. Far from the traditional monolithic view of theatrical works as tools for expanding ideology, these essays each recognize the power of theatre in reflecting on issues related to social justice. The first section of the book focuses on textual analysis, taking into account legal, feminist, and collective bargaining theory. The second section explores issues surrounding theatricality, performativity, and intellectual property laws through an analysis of contemporary adaptations. The final section reflects on social justice from the practitioners’ point of view, including actors and directors. Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre reveals how adaptations of classical theatre portray social justice and how throughout history the writing and staging of comedias has been at the service of a wide range of political agendas.

This volume seeks to explore developments in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature over the past decade through the prism of a homage volume that recognizes the contributions of James A. Parr. In his ground-breaking 1974 essay in Hispania, he challenged Hispanists to take note of developments in the fields of English and Comparative Studies, not to jump on the bandwagon, but to explore the emerging approaches to textual study in order to identify and adapt those aspects that could help to illuminate the field. In his own work, Parr followed that advice, with studies that incorporated new approaches to genre theory, narratology, and canonicity in order to explore dramatic and prose texts, and Don Quixote. The studies in this anthology make use of many of Parr's innovations, indicating that his work has had a long-lasting impact on the field of Golden Age Hispanism.