New Books
Below are the most recent book publications from our department. For a complete listing of each RLL member's publications, including articles, please visit our people profiles.
2022 Faculty Publications
María de Zayas y la imaginación crítica. Bibliografía razonada y comentada (2022)
Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Nadie duda ya que María de Zayas y Sotomayor ha sido uno de los fenómenos más notables de las últimas décadas para los historiadores de la literatura y de la cultura áurea. Los últimos cien años en particular han ofrecido una línea de continuidad que nos revela una sostenida fascinación tanto con su persona como con su legado narrativo, poético y dramático. La violencia extrema, los ambientes opresivos o las relaciones prohibidas, entre otros muchos ingredientes narrativos, han desafiado en ocasiones los límites de tolerancia y el efecto de la autocensura en periodos en que la amenaza de Zayas...
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Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain
Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain features essays by leading scholars in the fields of literary studies and the history of science, exploring the relationship between technical innovations and theatrical events that incorporated scientific content into dramatic productions. Focusing on Spanish dramas between 1500 and 1700, through the birth and development of its playhouses and coliseums and the phenomenal success of its major writers, this collection addresses a unique phenomenon through the most popular, versatile, and generous medium of the time. The contributors ...
See More2018 Faculty Publications
A Guide to Old Spanish
Steven Dworkin
This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. After discussing general methodological questions concerning the description and analysis of an earlier historical stage of a modern language, the individual chapters in the first part of the book describe the orthography, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of medieval Hispano-Romance. Steven N. Dworkin offers the first systematic description of...
See MoreMock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960
Nilo Couret
In Mock Classicism Nilo Couret presents an alternate history of Latin American cinema that traces the popularity and cultural significance of film comedies as responses to modernization and the forerunners to a more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. By examining the linguistic play of comedians such as Cantinflas, Oscarito and Grande Otelo, Niní Marshall, and Luis Sandrini, the author demonstrates aspects of Latin American comedy that operate via embodiment on one hand and spatiotemporal emplacement on the other. Taken together, these parallel examples...
See MoreEscenas Transcaribeñas
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Escenas transcaribeñas is a compilation of essays, blog entries, newspaper columns, and conference papers on theater, performance, literature, television, and visual arts, published in diverse sources (such as Claridad, El Nuevo Día, 80grados) in Puerto Rico and elsewhere from 1996 to 2017. It includes translations from English to Spanish, with a focus on LGBT topics and issues related to contemporary masculinities in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and among Latinxs in the United States.
2017 Faculty Publications
Reforming French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers
George Hoffmann
Reforming French Culture’s explicit subject is the literary genre of Reformation satire--colloquial, obscene, scatological--designed to mock the excesses as well as the essence of the Roman Catholic rite and hierarchy. It proposes that while romance, with its episodic, heroic narrative, is the literary genre of Counter‐Reformation, satire is the genre of Reformation. This minor category of Renaissance French literature constitues an “unstudied continent,” as Hoffmann describes it, that plays a key role not only in French literature, but also in French history, and in the evolution...
See MoreIn the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France
Peggy McCracken
In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions.
Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication...
See MoreInfrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico
Daniel Nemser
Many scholars believe that the modern concentration camp was born during the Cuban war for independence when Spanish authorities ordered civilians living in rural areas to report to the nearest city with a garrison of Spanish troops. But the practice of spatial concentration—gathering people and things in specific ways, at specific places, and for specific purposes—has a history in Latin America that reaches back to the conquest. In this paradigm-setting book, Daniel Nemser argues that concentration projects, often tied to urbanization, laid an enduring, material groundwork, or infrastructure...
See MoreRoberto Esposito’s The Origins of the Political. Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?
Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams, Translators
In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad--that "great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others"--as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.
Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous...
See MoreWitnessing beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina
Kate Jenckes
This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self and other “beyond the human,” that is beyond the sense that we can know and represent ourselves and others, with powerful implications for our understanding of history, community, and politics. Jenckes engages with the work of Jacques Derrida together...
See MoreNarrativas en Vilo
Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Clemencia Ardila, Luis Fernando Restrepo (Editors)
Si bien se puede considerar universal la capacidad humana para narrar, nuestra posibilidad de entender cómo las narrativas estructuran y dotan de sentido nuestro mundo requiere una aproximación crítica e histórica de las formas y prácticas narrativas. Este volumen reúne varias aproximaciones críticas a las narrativas en la literatura, la historia, el periodismo y el arte. Más que una cuestión meramente teórica sobre las narrativas, En vilo ofrece varias reflexiones interdisciplinarias que nos muestran cómo las prácticas estéticas posibilitan nuevas formas de pensar, vivir y narrar...
See MoreIntonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance
Nicholas Henriksen, Meghan E. Armstrong, Maria del Mar Vanrell
Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as in the intonation of Spanish in contact situations. The common thread is that each paper examines a specific topic related to the intonation of at least one Ibero-Romance language, framing the analysis in an experimental setting...
See MoreThe Refracted Muse: Literature and Optics in Early Modern Spain
Enrique García Santo-Tomás (Translated by Vincent Barletta)
Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique García Santo-Tomás unfolds in The Refracted Muse, the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence—not just among Spaniards working in the developing science of optometry but among creative writers as well. While Spain is often thought to have taken little notice of the Scientific Revolution, García Santo-Tomás tells a different story, one that reveals Golden Age Spanish literature to be in close dialogue with the New Science. Drawing on the work of writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón...
See MoreFrancisco Santos, Día y noche de Madrid
Enrique García Santo-Tomás
La obra de Francisco Santos es hoy en día casi una rareza, a pesar del éxito que tuvo en su tiempo e inmediata posteridad. Su novelística es testigo del agotamiento vital del último tercio del siglo XVII, y participa como ninguna de la imagen —convertida ya en recurso narrativo— del parto para narrar las miserias del Madrid finisecular como un cuerpo social enfermo, extremo y contaminado. La voz de Santos, emplazada en la intersección de lo moralista, lo costumbrista y lo picaresco, alterna pasajes artificiosos y recargados con el habla espontánea y sumamente creativa de la calle y del hampa...
See MoreA Brief and Transformative Account of Queer History/Un breve y transformador relato de la Historia Queer
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Volume 3, Enciclopedia Deiknumena. Dave Buchen, ed. and illustrator. 2nd edition.
Esta colaboración entre el artista visual Dave Buchen y el escritor Larry La Fountain-Stokes consiste de un pequeño libro bilingüe (en inglés y español) con un texto informativo sobre temas de sexualidad, particularmente asuntos LGBT (sobre la experiencia de lesbianas, gays, bisexuales y transgénerxs) y feministas.
2016 Faculty Publications
2015 Faculty Publications
Tirso de Molina, Amar por arte mayor
Enrique García Santo-Tomás
Comedia incluída en la Quinta parte de comedias del Mercedario (Madrid, Imprenta Real, 1636). Publisher: Universidad de Navarra Year of Publication: 2015
Marais Gay, Marais juif
David Caron
Dans le quartier du Marais cohabitent une communauté juive, constituée au fil des guerres et des pogroms, et une communauté gay depuis l'arrivée du sida.
Qu'est-ce qui fonde chacune d'entre elles ? Ni des modes de vie établis, ni un projet d'avenir partagé, mais la présence continuée, en creux, d'une catastrophe inaugurale.
Relues sous cet angles, les œuvres de Guillaume Dustan, Marcel Proust, Robert Antelme, Charlotte Delbo dessinent un concept de communauté incompatible avec le schéma familial archaïque comme avec le principe moderne du contrat : son modèle n'est autre que l'amitié...
See MoreIntroduction to Hervé Guibert, Cytomegalovirus
David Caron
By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death—as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the...
See More2014 Faculty Publications
Barlaam and Josaphat: A Christian Tale of the Buddha
Gui de Cambrai, Peggy McCracken (Translator), Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Introduction)
When his astrologers foretell that his son Josaphat will convert to Christianity, the pagan King Avenir confines him to a palace, allowing him to know only the pleasures of the world, and to see no illness, death, or poverty. Despite the king's precautions, the hermit Barlaam comes to Josaphat and begins to teach the prince Christian beliefs through parables. Josaphat converts to Christianity, angering his father, who tries to win his son back to his religion before he, too, converts. After his father's death, Josaphat renounces the world and lives as a hermit in the wilderness with his teacher...
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In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Peggy McCracken
The fascinating account of how the story of the Buddha was transformed into the legend of a Christian saint. The tale of St. Josaphat, a prince who gave up his wealth and kingdom to follow Jesus, was widely told and read in the Middle Ages, translated into a dozen languages, and even cited by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Only in the nineteenth century did scholars note the parallels between the lives of Buddha and Josaphat. In Search of the Christian Buddha traces the Buddha’s story from India to Persia to Jerusalem and then throughout Europe, as it was rewritten by Muslim, Jewish,...
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La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco
Enrique García Santo-Tomás
El itinerario histórico del presente libro arranca en una serie de textos y autores del reinado del tercer Felipe y termina en los últimos compases del siglo XVII. A lo largo de sus páginas explora el impacto que tuvieron en la España del Barroco los avances en óptica logrados bajo el marco de la denominada “Revolución científica” y se centra, concretamente, en el universo literario, prestando especial atención a aquellos textos y autores que incorporaron referencias a las aplicaciones del cristal en la disciplina de la astronomía desde su paulatina transición de lo tolemaico a lo copernicano...
See MoreModernism and Its Merchandise: The Spanish Avant-Garde and Material Culture, 1920-1930
Juli Highfill
The writers and artists of the Spanish avant-garde, enthralled with the streamlined, mass-produced commodities of the Machine Age, incorporated these objects into their literary and visual works. In doing so, they launched a broad inquiry into the relations between mind and matter, people and things, words and world. In Modernism and Its Merchandise, Juli Highfill traces that dissonant but productive line of inquiry by focusing on the objects of obsession for the Spanish vanguardists—starting with the fruit bowls of cubist still life; continuing with the merchandise, machines, and fashions of...
See MoreThe Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV
David Caron
In this radical, genre-bending narrative, David Caron tells the story of his 2006 HIV diagnosis and its aftermath. The Nearness of Others examines popular culture, politics, literary memoirs, and film to ask deeper philosophical questions about our relationships with others, demonstrating a form of disclosure, sharing, and contact that stand against the forces that work to separate us.
2013 Faculty Publications
Conversion and Narrative Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic
Ryan Szpiech
In Conversion, Prof. Szpiech draws on sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the importance of the narrative form in dramatizing the conversion of religious infidelity to faith in the context of medieval Western Mediterranean.

Don Diego de noche
Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, Enrique García Santo-Tomás (Editor)
La obra de Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo ve la luz en un momento de grandes transformaciones. Activamente involucrado con el parnaso literario de su tiempo y plenamente integrado en las discusiones sobre lo que debía ser o no la buena ficción, perteneció a varias Academias poéticas junto con figuras de la talla de Lope, Góngora o Quevedo. La mezcla y el eclecticismo que definen su producción convierten su figura para algunos en difícil de clasificar. Salas destaca como narrador, ensayando comedias en prosa, novelas “a cajones”, sátiras menipeas, picaresca femenina, cuadros entremesiles...
See MoreFrom Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe
Peggy McCracken (co-editor), E.Jane Burns (co-editor)
The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and animal elements that allow movement between, and even confusion of, components of each realm.
From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe raises the issues of species and gender in tandem, asking readers to consider more fully what happens to gender in medieval representations of nonhuman embodiment. The contributors...
2012 Faculty Publications
A History of the Spanish Lexicon: A Linguistic Perspective
Steve N. Dworkin
Marie de France: A Critical Companion
Peggy McCracken, Sharon Kinoshita
Marie de France is the author of some of the most influential and important works to survive from the middle ages; arguably best-known for her Lais, she also translated Aesop's Fables (the Ysope), and wrote the Espurgatoire seint Patriz (St Patrick's Purgatory), based on a Latin text. The aim of this Companion is both to provide information on what can be gleaned of her life, and on her poetry, and to rethink standard questions of interpretation, through topics with special relevance to medieval literature and culture.
2011 Faculty Book Publications
La estela del tiempo: Imagen e historicidad en el cine español contemporáneo
Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Focusing on contemporary Spanish cinema, this book presents a detailed analysis of extensive reflection on some films by Luis Buñuel, Jaime Chavarri, Ricardo Franco, Mario Camus, Alex de la Iglesia, and Mercedes Alvarez to discuss cultural and historical memory in contemporary Spain. Publisher: Iberamericana/Vervuert Year of Publication: 2011 Location: Madrid, Spain
The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy
Gareth Williams
The war on drugs has opened up a discussion on whether Mexico is living a state of exception or even becoming a failed state. This book argues that sovereign exceptionality has always been central to Mexican modernity. In this book Williams maps out political and cultural counter-genealogies in order to shed light on the workings of the constitutive couple of democracy (equality and freedom) in modern and contemporary Mexico. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Year of Publication: 2011 Location: New York, NY
Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes
Peggy McCracken, Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sarah Kay, Sharon Kinoshita
This co-written, multi-stranded book challenges assumptions about Chrétien as the author of a canon of works. In a series of lively exchanges, its five authors reassess the relationship between lyric and romance, between individuality and social conditions, and between psychology and medieval philosophy.
Vernacular Translation in Dante's Literature: Illiterate Literature
Alison Cornish
Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that the Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Publisher: Cambridge University Press Year of Publication: 2011 Location: New York
Les revenantes: Charlotte Delbo, la voix d'une communauté á jamais déportée
David Caron, Sharon Marquart
Professors David Caron (UM RLL) and Sharon Marquart (University of Houston) have written one of the first books in French devoted to Charlotte Delbo, a poet and playwright survivor of the Nazi camps whose works are considered equal in beauty and depth to Primo Levi and Robert Antelme.
2010 Faculty Publications
European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism
Karla Mallette
This book examines Orientalist philological scholarship of southern Europe produced between the mid-nineteeth and mid-twentieth century, focusing on Italy, Spain, and Malta. Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Year of Publication: 2010 Location: Philadelphia, PA
The Journal of Michigan Romance Studies (MRS)
The Journal of Michigan Romance Studies (MRS) is currently inactive following volume 16 (1996), but back issues are still available for purchase. To place an order, complete the MRS order form and send to RLL.
Be sure to send your payment, including shipping and handling costs, with your order. Orders will not be shipped until payment is received.
Each volume of MRS was presented by a guest editor and focused on critical, cultural, and literary subjects of interest in the various Romance languages.
The series examined topics such as French poetry, Spanish literature of the eighteenth century, contemporary readings of medieval literature, Italian literature and culture, studies in Romance linguistics, and aspects of French culture.