These twelve classic short stories reflect the idealistic and exotic appeal of a golden age in Spanish literature. Published from the 1830s to the 1860s, the heyday of the Romantic era, they remain popular with readers of every generation. Featured authors include "Fernán Caballero," Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Mariano José de Larra, Enrique Gil y Carrasco, and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. This dual-language edition features an informative introduction and ample footnotes, making it not only a pleasure to read but also a valuable learning and teaching aid for students and teachers of Spanish literature. Together with Dover's Spanish Stories of the Late Nineteenth Century, it offers a wide-ranging survey of an important literary age.

"The short stories explore themes that concern the interior person, the inner being. "A Day Laborer" tells of a liberal intellectual who can identify with exploited laborers because he himself has been exploited; "Change of Light" describes the spiritual peace that comes to a writer as a result of physical blindness; "The Golden Rose" shows through a series of contrasts - good and evil, heaven and earth, light and darkness - that virtue and sacrifice are rewarded; "Queen Margaret" chronicles the misery of failed opera singers who find happiness after leaving the short-lived glory of the theater; "Torso" relates the faithfulness of a servant who is rejected by a young master; "The Burial of the Sardine," with echoes of Francisco de Goya, represents the ephemeral nature of joy as experienced during Shrovetide in a city dominated by the clergy; and "Two Scholars" recounts how envy and vanity affect a personal relationship."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the first study to examine the representation of illness, disability, and cultural pathologies in modern and contemporary Iberian and Latin American literature. Innovative and interdisciplinary, the collection situates medicine as an important and largely overlooked discourse in these literatures, while also considering the social, political, religious, symbolic, and metaphysical dimensions underpinning illness. Investigating how Hispanic and Lusophone writers have reflected on the personal and cultural effects of illness, it raises central questions about how medical discourses, cultural pathologies, and the art of healing in general are represented. Essays pay particular attention to the ways in which these interdisciplinary dialogues chart new directions in the study of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures, and emerging disciplines such as the medical humanities. Addressing a wide range of themes and subjects including bioethics, neuroscience, psychosurgery, medical technologies, Darwinian evolution, indigenous herbal medicine, the rising genre of the pathography, and the ‘illness as metaphor’ trope, the collection engages with the discourses of cultural studies, gender studies, disability studies, comparative literature, and the medical humanities. This book enriches and stimulates scholarship in these areas by showing how much we still have to gain from interdisciplinary studies working at the intersections between the humanities and the sciences.

Modernity's Metonyms considers the representation of temporal frameworks in stories by the nineteenth-century Spanish authors, Leopoldo Alas and Antonio Ros de Olano. Adopting a metonymic approach_exploring the reiteration of specific associations across a range of disciplines, from literature, philosophy, historiography, to natural history_Modernity's Metonyms moves beyond the consideration of nineteenth-century Spanish literary modernity in terms of the problem of representation. Through an exploration of the associations prompted by three themes, the railway, food, and suicide, it argues that literary modernity can be considered as the expression of the perception that a linear model of time bringing together the past, the present and the future, was fragmenting into a proliferation of simultaneous moments. It draws French, German, American and British writers into discussion of stories by the canonical author Alas, and Ros de Olano, an author who is receiving increasing attention from scholars of nineteenth-century Spanish literature. Recent scholarship in the field of nineteenth-century Spanish literature and culture has challenged the thesis of 'retraso,' the thesis that Spain lagged far behind its European neighbors. Building on this scholarship, this monograph incorporates shorter works of experimental prose fiction into discussions of nineteenth-century literary modernity in Spain. It further expands the field by combining analysis of the writing of the canonical author, Leopoldo Alas with stories by Antonio Ros de Olano, whose work has been receiving increasing attention from scholars in the field. Rather than thinking of these works in terms of the ways they conform to established models provided by either contemporaneous French and British works, or by fin de siglo and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, Modernity's Metonyms works inductively. It builds outwards from the seven stories studies, identifying patterns of associations shared with writing by figures as diverse as Ludwig Feuerbach, Thomas Carlyle, Emilio Castelar, Briere de Boismont, P.J. Cabanis, or Jean-Anselme Brillat-Savarin. The seven stories discussed are Alas's 'Do-a Berta,' 'Zurita,' 'Cuervo' and 'Cuento futuro,' and Ros de Olano's 'Jornadas de retorno escritas por un aparecido,' 'Maese Cornelio TOcito,' and 'La noche de mOscaras.'