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This book delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of playwrights Joan Brossa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Fermín Cabal or Jordi Galcerán, among others. All of them grew up in, and imbibed, a theatrescape in which American borrowings were not only habitual (often the only foreign plays around) but inspiring and groundbreaking. If Alias Jimmy Valentine re-defined theatrical decorum in Catalonia in the early 1900s, The Vagina Monologues, in the 1990s, challenged prevalent sexual taboos. Throughout the 20th century, Catalonia went from a peripheral, marginalized region of a once vast empire to a booming and largely autonomous centre of culture, recognized all over the world and admired for its uniqueness and original artistic contributions. American plays accompanied, and often directly inspired, such a journey.Ramón Espejo is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Seville, Spain, and is one of the leading American drama and theatre scholars in Europe.

In the quarter-century following Uruguay's transition to democracy in 1985, there was a surge in the writing and popularity of historical novels. Authors such as Tomás de Mattos, Amir Hamed, Susana Cabrera, Mario Delgado Aparaín and Marcia Collazo Ibáñez engaged with archival sources, historical works, school textbooks, monuments and other forms of material culture in their bid to re-engage with the past.In her new study, Kardak follows the trajectory of recent Uruguayan historical fiction. Though these post-transition authors do not directly represent the 1973-85 dictatorship, instead depicting events of the nineteenth century, they nevertheless use history to address very present concerns of cultural identity. Heroes of independence such as José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) are reassessed, and historically marginalised groups like the Indigenous Charrúas and Afro-Uruguayans are brought into the forefront of the national story.

In the twentieth century, various Sephardic authors from the former Yugoslavia took upon themselves the task of revitalising different forms of Judeo-Spanish oral tradition such as narrative, songs or ballads.

Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s across Europe, and posited the moral and biological decline, even sterility, of European nations. In early twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Pío Baroja and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez both assimilated and subverted the cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Bénédict Morel, Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties about reproduction and national decadence, this interdisciplinary book traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the consumer agency of women readers. Through its alignment of gender paradigms and degenerationism in Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez, Bodies of Disorder offers a challenge to established hierarchies of canonical and popular fiction. Countering Baroja's resounding public disdain for his Valencian contemporary, Katharine Murphy repositions Blasco as markedly closer to the so-called 'Generation of 1898' than hitherto acknowledged.Dr Katharine Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. Author of Re-reading Pío Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.

Early modern Spanish American poetry (c. 1500-1700) is a fascinating but little-studied aspect of Hispanic colonial culture. Spanish American poetry was transmitted in material ways, not simply as an intellectual and literary phenomenon. Poetry was considered as a written and oral object, disseminated, conditioned and controlled by a range of societal players both within and beyond the urban space. While the obvious networks of interchange connected the European metropolis to the burgeoning colonies, there were also cross-regional connections in Central and South America. As performance art, poetry connected with other art forms in the region - music, painting and sculpture - but as an act of devotion it also intersected the history of early American religious culture.This wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary volume offers pioneering work bringing together scholars from both Europe and the Americas, North and South.Rodrigo Cacho is Reader in Spanish Golden Age and Colonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Imogen Choi is Associate Professor of Spanish at Exeter College, University of Oxford.

The philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991) is one of the foremost Spanish intellectuals of the twentieth century. A disciple of Ortega y Gasset, she taught at the University of Madrid in the 1930s and joined the Republican diaspora in exile, living in México, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Paris, Rome and Geneva till her return to Spain in 1984. A heterodox philosopher who conceived her role as that of an agent for ethical change, she sought to reconcile philosophy and poetry, and wrote not only essays on philosophy, but also plays, poetry, literary and art reviews, and a memoir. After the relative obscurity of her life in exile, her genius began to be recognized in the decade before her death, but she remains little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. These essays explore her legacy, offering new critical insights which draw on literature, aesthetics, gender studies, psychoanalysis, political theory and the visual arts.The editors teach modern Spanish literature at the University of Oxford, where Xon de Ros is a Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College, and Daniela Omlor is a Tutorial Fellow at Lincoln College and a Lecturer at Jesus College.

In recent years, interdisciplinary and comparative outlooks, greatly facilitated by the advent of new technologies, have transformed the discipline of Spanish Studies, leading to a re-evaluation of its scope and boundaries. To what extent is it legitimate to speak of 'Spanish Studies', given the linguistic and cultural diversity of Spain and the increasingly globalised nature of the world in which we live? How have digital technologies transformed the discipline, and, indeed, its objects of study? Have our methodologies and vocabulary kept apace with these advances? How do recent changes affect our access to and interpretation of cultural texts, past and present? And conversely: how do current re-evaluations of the past affect our understanding of the present? Thirteen early career researchers grapple with these and other questions in a collection of essays that elucidate the ways in which emerging scholars negotiate the urge to revise, re-shape or challenge the canon (transforming their discipline in the process), with the need to integrate their discourse within existing disciplinary boundaries.Stuart Davis is Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Girton College, and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge. Maite Usoz de la Fuente is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Leicester.