In the Spanish Golden Age, the new literary mode of vernacular prose fiction was deplored by many authorities for setting bad examples, undermining reality by deceiving with lies, and persuading in the face of rational disbelief. Dr Ife here examines the connection between the objections posed to this fiction and those raised two thousand years earlier by Plato. This book shows how the aims and results of 'picaresque' novel writing in fact counter such objections. In a study of three sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish novels Dr Ife demonstrates that the authors consciously exploited their readers' response to a narrative in order to bring them to a clearer understanding of their own experience. In this way the very process of representation deplored by the Platonist critics may be regarded as having a moral validity of its own. Additional English translations are provided of all the key extracts studied.

The extent to which contemporary rhetorics of nation and kingship reflected the realities of social, economic and cultural life in Habsburg Spain. Early modern Spain's insistent rhetorics of nation and kingship, of a monolithic body of shared values and beliefs, especially in respect of racial and gender stereotypes, and of a centralized and ostensibly absolutist legislativeapparatus did not map unproblematically onto the complex topography of everyday life. This volume explores the extent to which these rhetorics and the ideology they helped to construct or underpin reflected or failed to reflect the realities of social, economic, and cultural life. It sets against their typically exorbitant claims the lived, messy, and sometimes contradictory experience of Spaniards across a broad social spectrum, both at the centre and atthe margins, not just of peninsular society, but of the Hispanic world overseas. Confronting ideology were questions of economic pragmatism, executive feasibility, jurisdictional competence, and, above all, the social and political complexity of the Spain of the period. RICHARD J. PYM is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: TREVOR J. DADSON, MARGARET RICH GREER, BARRY IFE, ALISTAIR MALCOLM, MELVEENA MCKENDRICK, RICHARD J. PYM, HELEN RAWLINGS, ALEXANDER SAMSON, JULES WHICKER

The treatment of mythological material in the poetry, prose, drama, art and music of the Hispanic Baroque. Thirteen essays engage with one of the most obsessive aspects of the Baroque aesthetic, a dedicated commitment in distinct artistic contexts to the treatment of mythological material. Within the various 'Baroques' uncovered, thereis a single unity of purpose. Meaning is always negotiable, but the process of interpretation is dependent upon intertextual forms of understanding, and presupposes the active participation of the receiver. The volume explores how the paradigmatic mythical symbols of a Renaissance epistemological world view can be considered a barometer of rupture and a gauge of the contradictory impulses of the time. Essays explore the differing functions of mythology in poetry [Quevedo, Espinosa, Gongora], prose [Cervantes], drama [Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Calderon], art [Velazquez], and music [Latin American opera]. Collectively they trace the dialectic of continuity and rupture that underpins the appropriation of classical mythology in the period; demonstrating that the mythological legacy was not as uniform, as allegorically dominated, nor as depleted of potential as we are sometimes led to believe. ISABEL TORRES is Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast. Contributors: JEAN ANDREWS , STEPHEN BOYD, D. W. CRUICKSHANK, TREVOR. J. DADSON, B.W. IFE, ANTHONY LAPPIN, OLIVER NOBLE WOOD, JEREMY ROBBINS, BRUCE SWANSEY, BARRY TAYLOR, ISABEL TORRES, D. GARETH WALTERS

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading Cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity,and supposed "hidden mystery". After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, andto the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices. Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading Cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity,and supposed 'hidden mystery'. After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, andto the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices. Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.