Maria de Zayas Tells Baroque Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men Paperback / softback

by Margaret (Duke University) Greer

Part of the Studies in Romance Literatures series

Paperback / softback

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Description

MarÃa de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590â€“1650?) published two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and DesengaÃ±os amorosos (1647), which were immensely popular in her day.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities exiled her â€œscandalousâ€ 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 Zayasâ€™s prose, Margaret R.

Greer explores the relationship between narration and desire, analyzing both the â€œdesire for readersâ€ displayed by Zayas in her Prologue and the sexual desire that drives the telling within the novellas themselves.

Greer examines Zayasâ€™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 Zayasâ€™s own cultural context in shaping her work.

She discusses Zayasâ€™s biography and the reception of her publications; her advocacy of womenâ€™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.