Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men / Margaret Greer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greer, Margaret, Author.

Series:

Studies in Romance Literatures

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (480 p.)

Place of Publication:

University Park, PA : Penn State University Press, [2000]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–1650?) published two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647), which were immensely popular in her day. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities exiled her “scandalous” works to the outer fringes of serious literature. Over the last two decades, however, she has gained an enthusiastic and ever-expanding readership, drawing intense critical attention and achieving canonical status as a major figure of the Spanish Golden Age. In this first comprehensive study of Zayas’s prose, Margaret R. Greer explores the relationship between narration and desire, analyzing both the “desire for readers” displayed by Zayas in her Prologue and the sexual desire that drives the telling within the novellas themselves. Greer examines Zayas’s narrative strategies through the twin lenses of feminist and psychoanalytic theory. She devotes close attention to the weight of Renaissance literary traditions and the role of Zayas’s own cultural context in shaping her work. She discusses Zayas’s biography and the reception of her publications; her advocacy of women’s rights; her conflictive loyalty to an aristocratic, patriarchal order; her crafting of feminine tales of desire; and her erasure of the frontiers between the natural and supernatural, indeed, between love and death itself. In so doing, Greer offers an expansive analysis of this recently rediscovered Golden Age writer.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Titles of Zayas and Cervantes Novellas in English Translation

PART I The Subject in Question

Introduction: Desiring Readers

1 The Biographical Puzzle

2 The Writer and Her Reception

3 The Prologue "Al que leyere" and the Question of Zayas's Feminism

PART II The Mother Plot

4 Aventurarse perdiendo

5 Mothers Otherwise

PART III Border Crossings

6 Phallic Woman; or, The Laugh of the Medusa

7 The Sexual Masquerade: Cross-Dressing and Gender Definition

8 The Undead and the Supernatural

9 Familiar Enemies

PART IV En-closure

10 Framing the Tale

Conclusion

APPENDIXES

Appendix I: The First Ending of El castigo de la miseria

Appendix II: Plots Summaries

Appendix III: Charts of Stories

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Aug 2024)

ISBN:

0-271-09768-X