This reworked and streamlined version of Goytisolo's 1975 novel spins the reader through an angry, prickly catalogue of Spanish colonialism and slavery.

New edition of first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy.

An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In Marks of Identity, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.

A novel of England during the Viking era, from an author who “has vividly and colorfully portrayed life during the tumultuous Dark Ages” (Historical Novels Review). The last quarter of the tenth century was a time of conflict and exploration—while the Anglo-Saxons fought against the Vikings, Norsemen voyaged into the unknown looking for new lands to pillage, and so discovered America. Prince Rumon of France, descendant of Charlemagne and King Alfred, was a searcher. He had visions of the Islands of the Blessed, perhaps King Arthur’s Avalon, “where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.” Merewyn grew up in savage Cornwall—a lonely girl, sustained by stubborn courage and belief in her descent from great King Arthur. Chance—or fate—in the form of a shipwreck off the Cornish coast brought Rumon and Merewyn together, and from that hour their lives were intertwined. Bound by his vow to her dying mother, Rumon brings Merewyn safely to England, keeping hidden the shameful secret of her birth. He considers his responsibility ended. At court, he is dazzled by the beautiful Queen Alfrida—but when a murderous truth is revealed, he turns to Merewyn, only to discover that he may have lost her. And he will journey across the Atlantic to find her again . . . From the beloved bestselling author of Katherine and Dragonwyck, this is a romantic tale of history and adventure “characterized by an authentic sense of time” (The New York Times Book Review).

The interrelationship between sexuality and national identity during Puerto Rico's transition from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.

For Goytisolo, great writers are 'solitary birds' whose voice is an enchanting cry that pierces time.On his hospital bed, the persecuted narrator identifies with St John of the Cross, himself forced by the Inquisition to swallow his Treatise on the Qualities of the Solitary Bird. Through the scintillating successions of visions, soliloquies and ecstatic chants he converses with the banished saints. The agencies of repression have changed but, as in the past, a hideous revenge will be wrought on the heretic whose work is seen to be as deadly a contamination as AIDS. Four hundred years ago, St John creatively ransacked in his writing the cultures of Christianity, biblical Judaism and Muslim mysticism. Juan Goytisolo now pays rich homage, with atonal dissonance and constant invention.

SPAIN, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo - a beautiful widow with a shadowy past - puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís' son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to winter with Lluís' brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on 'dead' fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini's decision will put her family's fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, old friend and traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the civil war, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

"Well-written and powerfully argued. . . . I know of no other work [on the subject] as comprehensive in its scope, extensive in its analysis, coherent in its internal argument, and consistent in its evaluated sources."--Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University In this bold social history, Lillian Guerra explores the nature of popular-class and elite political consciousness in Puerto Rico from 1898 to 1940, the period when North American colonialism was taking shape. Through the prisms of gender, race, and class she analyzes the folk sayings of subalterns in tandem with the literary production of the intelligentsia, producing a mosaic of debate, dissent, and affirmation regarding Puerto Rican identity. The book focuses on two sources of intellectual and creative expression--a vast and largely unstudied collection of folk tales, songs, and riddles (the 1914 Mason collection) and the essayist movement (including writers such as Antonia Pedreira, Miguel Melendez Munoz, and Luis Munoz Marin), which appropriated the figure of the Puerto Rican peasant as a symbol of national identity. From these sources Guerra mines a spectrum of opinions and beliefs about the world of the popular classes and she demonstrates that their songs, word-play, and narrative expression formed the nexus for engagement with the elite. What results is an image of the Puerto Rican peasant that works both against and in collusion with elite society. Guerra's conclusions about class struggle for identity under North American imperialism challenge readers to compare the historical case of Puerto Rico with other colonial cases, not just in the Caribbean but throughout the Americas. Lillian Guerra is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Scholarship for 1995-96 and the Dorothy Danforth Compton Fellowship of the Institute for the Study of World Politics in 1997.

The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from 1600 to the present. Drawing on the combined legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, these essays focus on the question of invention and experiment, on what constitutes the singular features of evolving fictional forms. It examines how the novel articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, and gender and society. Contributors highlight the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the Spanish novel, which often takes a self-conscious stance toward literary tradition. Topics covered include the regional novel, women writers, and film and literature. This companionable survey, which includes a chronology and guide to further reading, conveys a vivid sense of the innovative techniques of the Spanish novel and of the debates surrounding it.