This companion volume offers an introduction to European Portuguese literature for university-level readers. It consists of a chronological overview of Portuguese literature from the twelfth century to the present day, by some of the most distinguished literary scholars of recent years, leading into substantial essays centred on major authors, genres or periods, and a study of the history of translations. It does not attempt an encyclopaedic coverage of Portuguese literature, but provides essential chronological and bibliographical information on all major authors and genres, with more extensive treatment of key works and literary figures, and a particular focus on the modern period. It is unashamedly canonical rather than thematic in its examination of central authors and periods, without neglecting female writers. In this way it provides basic reference materials for students beginning the study of Portuguese literature, and for a wider audience looking for general or specific information. The editors have made a principled decision to exclude both Brazilian and African literature, which demand separate treatment. STEPHEN PARKINSON, CLAUDIA PAZOS ALONSO and T. F. EARLE are all members of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at the University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: Vanda Anast cio, Helena Carvalhao Buescu, Rip Cohen, T. F. Earle, David Frier, Lu s Gomes, Mariana Gray de Castro, Helder Macedo, Patricia Odber de Baubeta, Hilary Owen, Stephen Parkinson, Cl udia Pazos Alonso, Juliet Perkins, Teresa Pinto Coelho, Phillip Rothwell, Mark Sabine, Claire Williams, Clive Willis.

Textual Agency examines the massive proliferation of poetic texts in fifteenth-century Spain, focusing on the important yet little-known cancionero poetry – the largest poetic corpus of the European Middle Ages. Ana M. Gómez-Bravo situates this cultural production within its social, political, and material contexts. She places the different forms of document production fostered by a shifting political and urban model alongside the rise in literacy and access to reading materials and spaces. At the core of the book lies an examination of both the materials of writing and how human agents used and transformed them, giving way to a textual agency that pertains not only to writers, but to the inscribed paper. Gómez-Bravo also explores how authorial and textual agency were competing forces in the midst of an era marked by the institution of the Inquisition, the advent of the absolutist state, the growth of cities, and the constitution of the Spanish nation.

This volume offers a thorough introduction to Jewish world literatures in Spanish and Portuguese, which not only addresses the coexistence of cultures, but also the functions of a literary and linguistic space of negotiation in this context. From the Middle Ages to present day, the compendium explores the main Jewish chapters within Spanish- and Portuguese-language world literature, whether from Europe, Latin America, or other parts of the world. No comprehensive survey of this area has been undertaken so far. Yet only a broad focus of this kind can show how diasporic Jewish literatures have been (and are ) – while closely tied to their own traditions – deeply intertwined with local and global literary developments; and how the aesthetic praxis they introduced played a decisive, formative role in the history of literature. With this epistemic claim, the volume aims at steering clear of isolationist approaches to Jewish literatures.

Beyond the immeasurable political and economic changes it brought, colonial expansion exerted a powerful effect on Portuguese culture. And as this book demonstrates, the imperial culture that emerged over the course of four centuries was hardly a homogeneous whole, as triumphalist literature and other cultural forms mingled with recurrent doubts about the expansionist project. In a series of illuminating case studies, Ramada Curto follows the history and perception of major colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire’s life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

This book adds to an international bibliography specialised on the reception of Homer, including studies on Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian and Argentinian authors (from the 19th to the 21st century) articulated by a common perspective, Homeric motifs, and differentiated by literary genre, that is, theatre, poetry, novel, and short story. Well-known and lesser-known names from the literatures being analysed also contribute to the novelty of the set. The contributors are researchers from each of the countries with a specific and well-informed vision of each context. Organising the volume according to these genres encourages historical and cultural comparisons of countries with a long tradition in common. Each analysis is always framed within its cultural context. Due to its characteristics, this volume serves an audience with different expectations, related to Classical Studies, Literary Theory and Portuguese and Spanish Language Literatures, Theatrical Studies, History of Culture, and Postcolonial Studies.

In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers. With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.

The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason. Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

Portugal was not always the best place for poets in the sixteenth century. Against the backdrop of an expanding empire, the country's annexation by Spain in 1580, and ongoing religious controversy, poets struggled to articulate their worth to rulers and patrons. This did not prevent them, however, from persisting in their craft. Indeed, many of their works reflected precisely on the question of what poetry could do and what, ultimately, its value was. The answers that poets like Luís de Camões, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, António Ferreira, and Diogo Bernardes offered to these questions, and which are explored in this book, ranged from lofty ideals to the more practical concerns of making ends meet when one depended on the whims of the powerful. This volume articulates a 'pragmatics of poetry' that combines literary analysis and book history with methods from sociology (network analysis, sociology of professions, valuation studies) to explore how poets thought about themselves and negotiated the value of their verse in the court, with patrons, or in the marketplace for books. It reveals how poets compared their work to that of lawyers and doctors and tried to set themselves apart as a special group of professionals. It shows how they threatened their patrons as well as flattered them and tried to turn their poetry from a gift into something like a commodity or service that had to be paid for. While poets set out to write in the most ambitious genres and to better their European rivals, they sometimes refused to spend months composing an epic without the prospect of reward. Their books of verse, when printed, were framed as linguistic propaganda as well as objects of material and aesthetic worth at a time when many said that non-devotional poetry was a sinful waste of time. This is a book about the various ways in which poets, metaphorically and more literally, tried to turn poetry and the paper it was written on into gold.

In this volume, Nicholas R. Jones analyzes white appropriations of black African voices in Spanish theater from the 1500s through the 1700s, when the performance of Africanized Castilian, commonly referred to as habla de negros (black speech), was in vogue. Focusing on Spanish Golden Age theater and performative poetry from authors such as Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Rueda, and Rodrigo de Reinosa, Jones makes a strong case for revising the belief, long held by literary critics and linguists, that white appropriations and representations of habla de negros language are “racist buffoonery” or stereotype. Instead, Jones shows black characters who laugh, sing, and shout, ultimately combating the violent desire of white supremacy. By placing early modern Iberia in conversation with discourses on African diaspora studies, Jones showcases how black Africans and their descendants who built communities in early modern Spain were rendered legible in performative literary texts. Accessibly written and theoretically sophisticated, Jones’s groundbreaking study elucidates the ways that habla de negros animated black Africans’ agency, empowered their resistance, and highlighted their African cultural retentions. This must-read book on identity building, performance, and race will captivate audiences across disciplines.