Books in the Studies in Romance Languages series

The integration of drama and scholastic moral philosophy was an important aspect of the critical theory of this era, which held that art should both teach and delight. Through close textual analysis of representative plays, this book examines the artistic fusion of natural-law philosophy and drama.

Collected here for the first time in a single volume is a broad and representative sampling of romances in translation that encompasses historical ballads (including those about Spain's greatest folk hero, el Cid), Moorish ballads, and ballads of chivalry, love, and adventure. For the collection, Shasta M.

In the long history of European prose fiction, few works have been more influential and more popular than the romance of chivalry Amadis of Gaul. The first great bestseller of the age of printing, Amadis of Gaul was translated into dozens of languages and spawned sequels and imitators over the centuries.

Traditionally, scholars have attributed only one complete play to Sor Juana, but in 1989 Guillermo Schmidhuber discovered a lost play, The Second Celestina, which he proved conclusively to be Sor Juana's earliest comedia, co-authored with Agustin Salazar y Torres.

Fernando Pessoa (1888--1935) is perhaps the most engaging of the great Western modernists of this century.

The hundreds of illuminated miniatures found in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, sponsored by King Alfonso X (1252--84), reveal many vistas of daily life in thirteenth century Spain. Combining keen observation of detail with years of experience in the field, John Keller and Annette Grant Cash bring to life a world previously little explored.

Now in Dramas of Distinction, Teresa Scott Soufas offers the first book-length critical study of five important women playwrights: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor.

The notion of writing as reading and reading as writing is thus central to an understanding of Cervantes' literary invention. Modern literary theory has confirmed what Cervantes and his contemporaries intuitively knew -- that reading and writing are closely linked dimensions of the literary enterprise.

Of equal value are the woodcuts, which depict the daily life of medieval Europe and contribute to a better understanding of fifteenth-century art history, bookmaking, natural history, and the visualization of narrative. La vida del Ysopet thus constitutes one of the finest concordances of text and illustration in European literary history.

"Brief narratives," or medieval precursors to the modern short story, are compositions couched in the form of a tale of reasonable short length. Keller studies the structure of the pious brief narrative, including such works at the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X and Gonzalo de Berceo's Milagros de Nuestra Senora, among others.

He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product.

Miracle tales, in which people are rewarded for piety or punished for sin through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, were a popular literary form all through the Middle Ages.

Of the great epic poets in the Western tradition, Luis Vaz de Camoes (c. In this major work of comparative scholarship, George Monteiro thus breaks new ground, focusing on English-language writers whose vision and expression have been sharpened by their varied responses to Camoes.