the first time that these sonnets have been brought together in one book translations that are not just accurate guides to the meaning of the originals but also enjoyable sonnets in their own right Offers detailed and incisive critical commentary on each of the poems; a complete and readable introduction.

Women across early modern Europe suffered repressive and restrictive patriarchal measures that denied them education and a voice. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Counter-Reformation Iberia. Yet there is increasing awareness of a wealth of cultural activity by women, produced in spite of long-cherished masculine notions of biological determinism, masculine control, and feminine shame. Women proved that given the opportunity and the education they were equal in reason and intelligence to their male counterparts. Subtle Subversions is the first full-length, contextual, and analytical study of the sonnets of five seventeenth-century women in Spain and Portugal: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán, Sor María de Santa Isabel, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, and Sor Violante del Cielo. Using the sonnets as a basis for inquiry, Gwyn Fox adds significantly to scholarship on women's interpersonal relationships through nuanced and revealing analyses of family and friendship as seen through the sonnets. She deciphers issues of subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, and power structures and engages with patronage as a major issue in women's writing. As a difficult form of poetry requiring wit, artistry and education, sonnets provided the ideal framework to display intellectual skills and education, but they also allowed the women to create a subtext of criticism of contemporary systems of control. Although their criticisms had to be subtle, since these systems still offered them much in terms of social advancement and privilege, these women and their works revise our understanding of women's lives in Baroque Spain and Portugal. English translations accompany the Spanish quotations throughout the book. Gwyn Fox is honorary research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she teaches Spanish language and literature. Fox is currently translating Los baños de Argel, a previously untranslated play by Miguel de Cervantes. "Fox demonstrates that the fixed form of the sonnet simultaneously allowed women to showcase their intellectual talents and critique predominant masculine norms in an understated fashion. . . . Recommended." -- P.W. Manning, Choice "In this beautifully written study of five early modern Iberian poets, Gwyn Fox offers a revisionary history of women's poetics as well as a challenge to conventional Renaissance hermeneutics. . . . Fox delves deeply into each theme, not only contextualizing, but also historicizing her analysis by comparing these women's writings with a broad range of examples. Indeed a bonus of this book is that it does not limit itself to the five women specified above or solely to their sonnets. Fox speaks knowledgeably about other women writers, such as Maria de Zayas and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, to name the most well known, and mentions lesser-known figures such as Inarda de Arteaga. . . . [Fox's] close readings of individual poems are themselves subtle and nuanced. . . . She offers original insights into the poems' social purpose. . . . It is a welcome and much-needed addition to early modern Spanish scholarship." -- Anne J. Cruz, Renaissance Quarterly "Fox's contribution adds to prior rediscoveries and assessments of the poetry of five Iberian women of the Baroque about whose lives, in some cases, very little is known. . . . The critical analysis offered in Subtle Subversions present new insights into the interpersonal relationships of women as well as their engagement with structures of social power, affirming that their sonnets were meant to display these authors' intellect, wit, and education. . . . With her skillful readings of their sonnets, Fox offers a fuller picture of these women's poetic production and contributes to an overall understanding of upperclass women's lives in Spain and Portugal." -- Dana Bultman, Caliope

A representative selection of the best poetry of Spain's Golden Age.

Love poetry in the Spanish Golden Age redefines the lyric poetry that is located at the centre of Imperial Spanish culture's own self-image and self-definition. This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and intheir dynamic interconnectedness. Moving beyond a re-evaluation of critical responses to four major poets of the period (Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo), this study disengages respectfully with the substantialbody of biographical research that continues to impact upon our understanding of the genre, and renegotiates the Foucauldian concept of the 'epistemic break', often associated with the anti-mimetic impulses of the Baroque. This more flexible model accommodates the multiperspectivism that interrogated Imperial ideology even in the earliest sixteenth-century poetry, and allows for the exploration of new horizons in interpretation. Isabel Torres isProfessor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.

With poems selected and translated by one of the preeminent translators of our day, this bilingual collection of 112 sonnets by six Spanish-language masters of the form ranges in time from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries and includes the works of poets from Spanish America as well as poets native to Spain. Willis Barnstone's selection of sonnets and the extensive historical and biographical background he supplies serve as a compelling survey of Spanish-language poetry that should be of interest both to lovers of poetry in general and to scholars of Spanish-language literature in particular. Following an introductory examination of the arrival of the sonnet in Spain and of that nation's poetry up to Francisco de Quevedo, Barnstone takes up his six masters in chronological turn, preceding each with an essay that not only presents the sonneteer under discussion but also continues the carefully delineated history of Spanish-language poetry. Consistently engaging and informative and never dull or pedantic, these essays stand alone as appreciations--in the finest sense of that word--of some of the greatest poets ever to write. It is, however, Barnstone's subtle, musical, clear, and concise translations that form the heart of this collection. As Barnstone himself says, "In many ways all my life has been some kind of preparation for this volume."

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues that collaboration between academics and theatre practitioners was instrumental in the success of the season and that the work carried out has repercussions for critical debate of Comedia. The volume posits a model for future productions of the Comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer and director, and will be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.