Gabriel Francisco Miro Ferrer was born on July 28th 1879, in Alicante on the Costa Blanca. Brought up in the Castilian-speaking Alicante, Miro was sent away to school in nearby Orihela, aged eight. The Jesuit Colegio de Santo Domingo would become the "Jesus" in The Leper Bishop. Miro studied Law, first a the University of Valencia, then at Granada, from which he graduated in 1900. He married in 1901, at the age of 22, and in that same year published his first novel, La mujer de Ojeda. The Leper Bishop was published in December 1926, when Miro was a grandfather, and he died not long afterwards, in May 1930, of peritonitis. The Leper Bishop (El obispo leproso) follows the story (begun in Our Father San Daniel) of a boy, Pablo, who is sent to a Jesuit school - a place where an extremist version of Catholicism is inflicted on its pupils. The novel portrays the struggle between innocence and evil, which, by the end of the book, is tempered by understanding. Miro has traditionally been seen as a writer difficult or impossible to translate, with very few of his works available in English. It is hoped that this edition will bring this lyrical writer's work to a wider audience.

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The second section contains ten critical essays that apply widely varying critical approaches that range from feminist, psycho-analytical, formalist, poststructuralist, new historical, and intertextual to postmodern and postcolonial. The volume also features Riera's hitherto unpublished play in the Catalan original and in English translation. This book will appeal to those interested in twentieth-century Peninsular literature, comparative literature, feminist criticism, gender studies, and cultural studies.

The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from 1600 to the present. Drawing on the combined legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, these essays focus on the question of invention and experiment, on what constitutes the singular features of evolving fictional forms. It examines how the novel articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, and gender and society. Contributors highlight the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the Spanish novel, which often takes a self-conscious stance toward literary tradition. Topics covered include the regional novel, women writers, and film and literature. This companionable survey, which includes a chronology and guide to further reading, conveys a vivid sense of the innovative techniques of the Spanish novel and of the debates surrounding it.