Molinaro, Nina L. The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2019). Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question "what should I do?" has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. Emmanuel Levinas, one of the foremost twentieth-century theorists of ethics, radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that "the ethical" is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers and their literary texts are closely related to the specific sociopolitical and historical circumstances in Spain, and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, responsibility, temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.
Martuscelli, Tania. Obras Completas de Mário-Henrique Leiria, vols. I-IV (Lisbon, Portugal: E-Primatur, 2017-2022)
Mário-Henrique Leiria was an acclaimed writer, essayist, and painter who joined the Surrealist group in Portugal in the late 1940s. In order to avoid political persecution during Salazar dictatorship, Leiria moved to São Paulo, Brazil. He lived there for nine years. Back in Portugal in 1970, Leiria published two best-selling books: The Gin and Tonic Short Stories (1973), and New Stories of the Gin (1974). This second volume brings to light a side of the author that was until now unknown to the public: his poetry.
Molinaro, Nina L. Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Crime Fiction. (Burlington and Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015)
Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain since 1980. Policing Gender examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural: even as Giménez Bartlett’s series incorporates gender differences into the crime fiction formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. With the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as the result of men’s supposedly innate protectiveness and/or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. The volume includes analyses of the nine installments that currently make up the Petra Delicado series, as well as engaging contemporary cultural theories of gender.
Silleras-Fernández, Núria. In and Of the Mediterranean. Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, ed. Michelle Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Hispanic Issues, 2015)
This volume showcases work being done by scholars whose contributions reveal and consider medieval and early modern Iberian history and cultural production through the perspective of the Mediterranean. In contrast to traditional, national (area studies) models of cultural analysis, Mediterranean Studies has in recent decades offered an alternative critical lens through which to consider national histories and cultures not in isolation, but as connected and interrelated (even when such connections were conflictive) through trade, language, religion, diaspora, politics... Such a comparative methodology, “Mediterraneanizing” our frame of reference, helps bringing together new approaches to both texts and problems, while taking into account concepts such as mobility, portability, connectivity, and segmentation.
Contributors to the volume: Michelle Hamilton, Núria Silleras-Fernández, Brian Catlos, Gerard Wiegers, Manuela Marín, Nicholas Parmley, Simone Pinet, Vicente Lledó-Guillem, Andrew Deveraux, Josiah Blackmore, Eleazar Gutwirth, David Wacks, Ryan Giles, Luis Avilés, Barbara Fuchs, Luís Martín-Estudillo, and Nicholas Spadaccini.
Silleras-Fernández, Núria. Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 328 pp.
Based on unedited archival documentation, letters, manuscripts, incunabula, as well as a wide range of published material, Chariots of Ladies shows how a program of piety and morality devised by Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan theologian, royal counselor, and writer, in Catalonia in the 1390s, came to characterize the feminine ideal in the highest circles of the Iberian aristocracy in the age of the Catholic Kings and the Golden Age. As Eiximenis’s work was adapted and translated into Castilian over the course of the century and a half that followed, it became a model of devotion and conduct for queens and princesses, including Isabel the Catholic, and her descendants who ruled in Portugal, the Spanish Empire of the Hapsburgs, and England. By studying Eiximenis’s ideas on gender and devotion as they were read, first, by the women for whom he wrote (Countess Sanxa Ximenis d’Arenós and Queen Maria de Luna of Aragon), how they were then changed by his adaptors and translators in Castile for new readers (like Isabel the Catholic, Juana the Mad, and her other daughters), and in sixteenth-century Portugal for new patronesses (Juana’s daughter, Catalina of Habsburg and her daughter, Maria Manuela, first wife of Philip II), the book casts light on a neglected dimension of encounter and exchange in Iberia from the late-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries.
Teaching Gender Through Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Texts and Cultures, ed. Leila Gómez, Asunción Horno-Delgado, Mary Long, and Núria Silleras-Fernández (Rotterdam: Sense Publishing, 2015), 230 pp.
This is the first volume to explore the subject of teaching gender and feminism through multiple theoretical and practical perspectives relating to Latin American, Iberian, and Latino/a authors and cultures ranging from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.
Authors: Leila Gómez, Sara Castro-Klarén (John Hopkins), Núria Silleras-Fernández, Vanesa Miseres (Notre Dame), Ellen Mayock (Washington and Lee Univ.), Valerie Hegstrom (Brigham Young), Amy R. Williamsen (Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro), Cynthia Tompkins (Arizona State), Amanda L. Petersen (Univ. of San Diego), Shelley Godsland (Univ. of Birmingham), Mary K. Long, and Debra Castillo (Cornell).
Molinaro, Nina and Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva, eds. Esther Tusquets: Scholarly Correspondences. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014
The volume reviews and revisits the life and work of Spanish writer, editor, and intellectual Esther Tusquets (1936-2012). The author of some seven novels, three collections of short stories, two books for children, seven volumes of essays and memoirs, and an extensive corpus of journalistic and other short prose texts, Tusquets's contributions to contemporary Spanish culture and literature are vast and heterogeneous. Most academic scholarship to date has been dedicated to Tusquets's groundbreaking novelistic trilogy and to her first collection of short stories. The essays in *Esther Tusquets: Scholarly Correspondences* offer new readings of the author's canonical fiction and delve into the largely unexplored terrain of her non-fiction.
Krauel, Javier. Imperial Emotions: Cultural Responses to Myths of Empire in Fin-de-Siècle Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013
The book argues that the demise of the Spanish empire in 1898 spurred a number of contradictory emotional responses, ranging from mourning and melancholia to indignation, pride, and shame. Two central questions inform the research and help develop the theoretical position defended in this book: one, what was the role of emotions in transforming Spain’s imperial myths, a central component of Spanish national identity that was clearly exhausted at the beginning of the twentieth century? And two, what type of political community did these conflicting emotions help legitimate?
Herrero-Senés, Juan. Benjamín Jarnés: Venús dinámica. Edition and introduction by Juan Herrero-Senés and Domingo Ródenas de Moya. Sevilla: Ed. Renacimiento, 2013
Venus dinámica [Dinamical Venus] (1943), the latest novel by Benjamín Jarnés, and the one with a more complex structure, serves as a compendium of motives and values of the work of the author. In it we find the story of Adolfo, a scholar with a grey life that with the help of a modern and beautiful young, Dolly, discovers the pleasures of life, which happen to be those that the scholar knows through the books but has not been able to enjoy in his own existence. With this story, the novel states here a vitalism at any cost, the need to search for the integration of spirit and matter in personal fulfillment, and the defense of happiness and joy over pain, for vitalism is also risk and adventure.
Martuscelli. Tania. Mário-Henrique Leiria Inédito e a Linhagem do Surrealismo em Portugal (Lisbon: Colibri Editores, 2013)
The volume offers a thorough analysis of Portuguese Surrealism as part of a lineage, or, rather, as part of an aesthetic that permeates Portuguese literary movements from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It focuses on Mário-Henrique Leiria’s unpublished work, with an examination of the literary mechanisms by which the author cleverly appropriates and repurposes several literary movements into his own. Although Mário-Henrique Leiria is known for his activities within the Portuguese surrealist movement, and for his two groundbreaking collections of political short stories (Contos do Gin Tonic and Novos Contos do Gin), the majority of his poetic and theoretic work from the 1930s to the 1970s remained unpublished - until now.
Silleras-Fernández, Núria. María de Luna. Poder, piedad y patronazgo de una reina bajomedieval. Trans. Virginia Tabuenca. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2012
This book, which is a revised Spanish translation of my scholarly monograph Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship, is a study of medieval queenship (reginalidad medieval) – an examination of the nature and role of feminine authority and power and the monarchy in the late Middle Ages. Based on thorough and rigorous archival research, it examines the life and career of Maria de Luna queen-consort of the Crown of Aragon (1396–1406) and lieutenant-general (second-in-command) of her husband, King Martí I (1396–1410). It is not, however, a biography. It approaches the phenomenon of queenship from an array of perspectives, and demonstrates – by uncovering networks of cultural, religious, and familial patronage – that “political” activities cannot be sectioned off from the wider activities of the royal and queenly court.
Elmore, Peter. Antología poética. Antonio Cisneros. Selection and prologue by Peter Elmore. Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica, col. Aula atlántica, 2012
The late Antonio Cisneros (1942-2012) was a key figure in contemporary Latin American poetry as well as the most renowned among the poets of the Peruvian "Generacion del 60". Antología poética ranges over the whole of Cisneros´s distinctive oeuvre, starting from the playful and irreverent wit of his early books -Comentarios reales and Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero- and leading to the wistfully visionary wisdom of his last opus, Un crucero a las islas Galápagos.
An introductory essay places the poet in his historical and literary context, underscoring his contributions to contemporary Peruvian and Latin American poetry.
Hallstead, Susan and Juan Pablo Dabove. Annotated edition of El año del desierto by Pedro Mairal. Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2012
El año del desierto is the story of a year in the life of Maria Valdes Neylan, narrated by herself, from somewhere in Ireland or England. The novel narrates the (literal) dissolution of a city (Buenos Aires), of a nation (Argentina) and of a life story (that of María). The agent of this dissolution is the Wilderness (la intemperie). But, what is the Wilderness? The novel does not provide any definition or clarification regarding its nature. We do not know if it's a natural or supernatural phenomenon. We do not know if it's a sentient phenomenon, an instrument animated by an evil design or just an impersonal force. Furthermore, nobody witnesses the Wilderness in action. Only its effects are recorded: the gradual (but fast-paced) degradation and disappearance of buildings, streets, of all trace of human work or habitation, and its replacement by a nature (certainly not Mother Nature) out of control. Because of the Wilderness, the city disappears and the Desert reclaims what always belonged to it. This novel by Pedro Mairal (Buenos Aires, 1970) is a brilliant tour de force. On the one hand, it captures the Zeitgeist of post-2001, pre-Kirchner Argentina. But, as happens in Kafka's fictions (or in any work of literature worthy of that name) Mairal takes the allegory well beyond the mere document of the present. In these pages the reader will find a story that is simultaneously familiar and infinitely strange, the sights and sounds of Buenos Aires' everyday life, but also the peculiar taste of a nightmare. The novel is also a sui generis archive of Argentina's historical, cultural and literary experience (its events and characters, as well as its founding tropes and obsessions are all there). Susan Hallstead and Juan Pablo Dabove have exhaustively annotated the novel to allow the reader access to the myriad allusions and meanings embedded in the novel. However, in spite of Mairal's totalizing ambition, El año del desierto never ceases to be a highly legible novel, with a capacity to move us with the vicissitudes of María's individual destiny. The introduction (also by Hallstead and Dabove) locates Mairal in his historical and literary context, and gives numerous clues for a complete understanding (and enjoyment) of this novel, one of the best in recent Argentine narrative.
Baena, Julio. Quehaceres con Góngora. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011
This book is a structured set of critical insights around the unique phenomenon of Góngora’s poetry. “Quehaceres”—“things to do”—is the tag that the author has pinned on eachof the several undertakings that interact, or face each other dialectically, in the book. The first thing to do is entitled “Góngora a solas,” and it brings face to face two old enemies: performance and textuality, in an attempt to differentiate the use-value of poetry—of any poetry—from any exchange-value or “meaning.” This differentiation, with its concomitant pleasure, is, of course, both impossible to attain and indispensable. Only through the laborious fabrication of a silencing apparatus can it be approached.
The second “thing to do” (“La soledad en construcción”) is to draw the master plan of such a silencing machine. Such a machine already exists: it is Góngora’s own poem Soledades, of which the strange title (the plurality of alone) points to the root of the problem—our—problem. Language as a problem becomes a symptom of a deeper crisis, and points to a persistent wish to “get out.” This crisis was first announced by the mystics (John of the Cross or Teresa of Ávila), and, thus, Quehacer Tercero) explores how can this be, given that nothing seems to be more opposite to the poetry of John of the Cross (“fábula mística”) than that of Góngora (“poesía prófuga”).
A fourth section (“Otros quehaceres”) puts together several short pieces of unpublished material by the author, which illuminate some of the main aspects of the book, or constitute independent points of reflection on a few Gongorine issues. There are two notes on the Polifemo (one on the dialectics of acquisition/consumption, and one on the paradox of “beautifully singing badly”). Another “quehacer” notices a strange irregularity in the rhyme of the first lines of Soledades. Another one relates two old cousins (Garcilaso and Góngora) to a third, seemingly unrelated one (Juan Alfonso de Baena—no known relation to the author of this book either), and the final “thing to do” of the book is to simply remark that “isolation” comes from the same root as “island,” an island being a place surrounded by shore on all sides. And since “shore” is obsessively abundant in Góngora’s poetry, the book closes with a return to its opening yearn (“a solas”)
Herrero-Senés, Juan. Critical edition of Lluís Montanyà. Defensa de l'avantguardisme. Barcelona: A Contravent, 2011
This critical edition presents an anthology of the work of the Catalan literary critic Lluís Montanyà (1903-1985), who formed with painter Salvador Dalí and art crític Sebastià Gasch the core group of the Catalan avant-garde. They published in 1928 one of the most important avant-garde manifests in Spain, the "Manifest Groc", and Montanyà became a key figure in the critical reception of innovative literature as was produced in Europe, from Dada to the surrealist to Joyce, Cendrars, Bontempelli or Lorca. Relying on archival research in Spain and Switzerland (where Montanyà exiled after the Spanish Civil War), the book offers a wide selection of articles and reviews by Montanyà spanning the years 1926 to 1938, with an introduction on Montanya's life, work and critical perspectives.
Prieto, Andrés. Missionary Scientists. Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570-1810. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2011
Missionary Scientists explores the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries in colonial Spanish America, revealing a little-known aspect of religions role in the scholarship of the early Spanish Empire. Grounded in an examination of the writings and individuals authors who were active in South American naturalist studies, this study outlines new paths of research often neglected by current scholarship.What becomes clear throughout Missionary Scientists is that early missionaries were adept in adapting to local practices, in order to both understand the scientific foundations of these techniques and ingratiate themselves to the native communities.
Herrero-Senés, Juan. Annotated edition of Niebla, by Miguel de Unamuno. Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2010
The importance of Unamuno's Niebla in the Spanish and European scene of the first half of the twentieth century can not be overstated: it condenses central dilemmas about existence and immortality and how to live one's life, issues that haunted the author; It breaks the usual rules of the novel with innovate procedures culminating in a revolutionary use of metafiction, and it offers through the story of the troubles of Augusto and Eugenia a gallery of complex characters that synthesize various attitudes towards life. Niebla is direct in its complexity, depth and emotion, and as few literary works has been forcing us, its readers, to wonder who we are, for almost a hundred years. This edition includes the final text, plus some articles by Unamuno that refer to it, an introduction and numerous notes.