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Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion

At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes.  But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.
 
 

400 pages | 5 halftones, 1 map, 1 table | 6 x 9 | © 2009

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe

History: European History

Literature and Literary Criticism: Romance Languages

Women's Studies

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Series Editors’ Introduction

Volume Editors’ Introduction

Volume Editors’ Bibliography

Note on the Translations

 

I Exemplary Tales of Love

Title Page (1637 Edition)  

To the Reader

Prologue by a Disinterested Person

Introduction  

Taking a Chance on Losing

Second Night

Forewarned but Fooled

Fifth Night

The Judge of Her Own Case

The Deceitful Garden

 

II Tales of Disillusion

Title Page (1647 Edition)

Introduction

Her Lover’s Slave

Second Night

Fifth Tale of Disillusion

Tenth Tale of Disillusion

Appendixes

A Contents of Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor’s Novella Collections

B Map of Locations of Stories

C Glossary

Series Editors’ Bibliography 

Index 

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