This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

Meets the needs of today's teachers and students Gathered to meet the upsurge of interest in Latin America, this collection features major critical articles dealing with the authors and texts customarily taught in colleges and universities in the United States. The articles are in English and Spanish, with a predominance of the former. Surveys a dynamic and exciting area of research Four Latin American writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature: Guatemalan Miquel Angel Asturias, Chilean Gabriela Mistral, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chilean Pablo Neruda. Also internationally recognized are the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Chilean Isabel Allende, to name only a few. Moreover, the sociopolitical circumstances of the past four decades of Latin American history, and the growing importance of the region have resulted in the creation of Latin American studies programs in numerous American universities. All of this literary activity hasinspired innumerable dissertations, theses, books, and journal articles. Explores contemporary Latin Americanissues and concerns In the face of such an enormous proliferation of commentary, students of Latin America and its literature need a body of basic texts that will provide them an orientation in the various research areas and new schools of thought that have emerged in the field. Particularly important are the essays and articles that have appeared in periodicals and other sources that Anglo American readers often find difficult to obtain. Individual volumes available: Vol. 1 Theoretical Debates in Spanish American Literature 448 pages, 0-8153-2676-9 Vol. 2 Writers of the Spanish Colonial Period 456 pages, 0-8153-2678-5 Vol. 3 From Romanticism to Modernismo in Latin American Literture 352 pages, 0-8153-2680-7 Vol. 5 Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature Since 1960 416 pages, 0-8153-2681-5

Pablo Adalberto Ortiz Quiñones (1914–2002) was one of the most gifted writers in Ecuador and all of Latin America. Yet outside of Ecuador and amongst Afro-Hispanic literature scholars in the United States, little critical attention has been given to this pioneer whose multi-genre contributions spanned decades. In his writings, Ortiz explores some of the defining social issues in the Americas since the African and European encounters with the New World, including the notion of “race.” He articulates a complex process of affirming the ethnic while not denying the national. Consequently, miscegenation—a biological process—as well as acculturation are motifs in his writings, which explore the essence of what it means to be Ecuadorian. Ortiz does not dwell upon the so-called “race” question, the issue that causes such anxiety and hostility, overtly and covertly, in the United States. Rather, he explores, in depth, ethnicity, class, and caste in his earlier writings and evolves into an international writer while maintaining a strong black awareness. Adalberto Ortiz’s transcendence of victimization to a broader view of the world is indicative of the title of Marvin A. Lewis’ analysis —from margin to center—and reflective of the approach taken by many Afro-Hispanic writers. The dialectical nature of Ortiz’s writings makes his work particularly interesting and rewarding, as revealed in Adalberto Ortiz: From Margin to Center. In this book, Lewis examines the form and content relationships between works published during different literary periods and movements. Emphasis is placed on Ortiz’s transition from the local to the international in each genre, and the theoretical approach is “eclectic,” depending upon the exigencies of the texts. Ecocriticism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, and other methodologies addressing the environment, place/displacement, identity, and historiographic metafiction are fundamental to the Lewis’ readings of Ortiz’s prose and poetry.

"There are also separate sections on the modernistas and postmodernismo, avant-garde poetry in the twentieth century, and the Boom novel. A final chapter is dedicated to an analysis of some recent developments within the Spanish-American literary canon, such as the post-Boom novel, with a separate section on women writers, 'testimonio', Latino literature, the gay/lesbian novel, and Afro-Hispanic literature."--BOOK JACKET.

These interdisciplinary essays focus on how cultural practices help form the Spanish identity, by introducing a range of theoretical debates and exploring specific areas of 20th century Spanish culture.

A Companion to Latin American Literature offers a lively and informative introduction to the most significant literary works produced in Latin America from the fifteenth century until the present day. It shows how the press, and its product the printed word, functioned as the common denominator binding together, in different ways over time, the complex and variable relationship between the writer, the reader and the state. The meandering story of the evolution of Latin American literature - from the letters of discovery written by Christopher Columbus and Vaz de Caminha, via the Republican era at the end of the nineteenth century when writers in Rio de Janeiro as much as in Buenos Aires were beginning to live off their pens as journalists and serial novelists, until the 1960s when writers of the quality of Clarice Lispector in Brazil and García Márquez in Colombia suddenly burst onto the world stage - is traced chronologically in six chapters which introduce the main writers in the main genres of poetry, prose, the novel, drama, and the essay. A final chapter evaluates the post-boom novel, testimonio, Latino and Brazuca literature, gay, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian literature, along with the Novel of the New Millennium. This study also offers suggestions for further reading. STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London, and Profesor Honorario, Universidad de San Marcos, Lima.

The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world. What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed. The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.

The Unsettlement of America explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of inter-indigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfolds across the centuries, The Unsettlement of America addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.

Is there a way of thinking about literature that is 'outside' or 'against' literature? In Against Literature, John Beverley brilliantly responds to this question, arguing for a negation of the literary that would allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace literature's hegemony.

This book analyses contemporary Mexico-China relations as a complex cultural encounter. Through an unprecedented analysis of the discursive production of a series of diplomatic, media and academic sources, this book demonstrates how, embedded in the great technological and political transformations of our transition into the 21st century, Mexico-China relations embodied a complex process of knowledge formation, confronting their socially constructed conceptions of time, space and otherness: a cultural encounter. The book advances the idea that the cultural encounter between Mexico and China provides a fundamental case for understanding world politics and human interaction from a truly global perspective and beyond reductionist views of reality. Unlike previous works, which have predominantly focused on economics or geopolitics – strongly influenced by a realist approach – the book will present the subject as a dynamic interaction between ideological and material factors. Mexico-China Relations contributes to the study of otherness construction and critical understanding of the non-Western world in international relations (IR). It will appeal to researchers and students of IR theory, political theory, cultural studies and studies of the impact of cultural influences on foreign policy, as well as professionals working on Sino-Latin American relations.