| 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. |
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