Books in the Penn State Romance Studies series

Examines the political writings of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo within the context of the social and material practices of spectacle culture.

An English translation of The Book of Peace, written between 1412 and 1414 by Christine de Pizan, one of the earliest known women authors. Translated material is side by side with the original French text.

Based on readings of representative poems by eight Peninsular writers, this book demonstrates that the lyric was a crucial site for the negotiation of masculine identity as Spain's noblemen were alternately cajoled and coerced into abandoning their identifications with images of the medieval hero and assuming instead the posture of subjects.

Clothing figured prominently in twelfth-century France, where exotic fabrics and furs came to define a social elite. This interdisciplinary book explores how writers of this era used clothing as a signifier with multiple meanings for many narrative purposes. It shows that representations of clothing are not mere embellishments to the text.

The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. This book brings together prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan - sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages.

Explores a scenario common to the works of four French novelists: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Valle's. This book reviews some of the contributing trends that attracted one or more of the authors: mesmerism, dissection, transformism and evolution, understandings of human reproduction, spontaneous generation, puericulture, the experimental method.

An historical and theoretical literary study of three Latin American women writers, Refugio Barragan of Mexico, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera of Peru, and Ana Roque of Puerto Rico. Examines how these novelists subversively rewrote womanhood vis a vis the prescribed comportment for women during a conservative era.

A study of art, architecture and literature produced in Portugal and Cape Verde during the period 1933-1948. Documents artistic responses to images of the Portuguese nation promoted by the Salazar government's Office of State Propaganda. Examines the works of Jose de Almada Negreiros, Irene Lisboa, and Baltasar Lopes.

Examines literary portrayals of women who practice healing and love magic, and argues that these figures were modeled on informally trained practitioners common in the magico-medical paradigm of the high Middle Ages, and were well-respected and successful.

Seeks to understand early twentieth-century France by examining novels written about professional women, bourgeois and working-class heroines, and the particular dilemmas that they faced. This book can change the way we think about the Belle Epoque and the interwar period in French literary history.

Explores the unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In highlighting the parallels between sixteenth-century debates and post-structuralist approaches to the study of history, this book uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition.