This is a bilingual edition of the only extant play, a comedy, written by the seventeenth-century Spanish writer, Maria de Zayas. This edition makes the play available to a wide audience of specialists and nonspecialists in the field of Spanish Golden Age theater.

Five men and five women entertain their hostess with stories exploring some aspect of enchantment or love between a handsome gallant and a lovely lady. The sharp contrast between the women's and men's stories transmits a subtle, often ironic, feminism.

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.

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590–1650?) published two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647), which were immensely popular in her day. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities exiled her “scandalous” works to the outer fringes of serious literature. Over the last two decades, however, she has gained an enthusiastic and ever-expanding readership, drawing intense critical attention and achieving canonical status as a major figure of the Spanish Golden Age. In this first comprehensive study of Zayas’s prose, Margaret R. Greer explores the relationship between narration and desire, analyzing both the “desire for readers” displayed by Zayas in her Prologue and the sexual desire that drives the telling within the novellas themselves. Greer examines Zayas’s narrative strategies through the twin lenses of feminist and psychoanalytic theory. She devotes close attention to the weight of Renaissance literary traditions and the role of Zayas’s own cultural context in shaping her work. She discusses Zayas’s biography and the reception of her publications; her advocacy of women’s rights; her conflictive loyalty to an aristocratic, patriarchal order; her crafting of feminine tales of desire; and her erasure of the frontiers between the natural and supernatural, indeed, between love and death itself. In so doing, Greer offers an expansive analysis of this recently rediscovered Golden Age writer.

A seventeenth-century writer of sensationalist short stories, María de Zayas was a bestselling author, steeped in the novella traditions of Italy and France as well as her native Spain. At the same time, she was an important player in the tabloid craze sweeping over the Europe of her day. Marina S. Brownlee recontextualizes María de Zayas and provides a reading of Zayas's work from the double perspective of narratology and feminism. In doing so Brownlee explores the complexities of human subjectivity and its representation in the writings of Zayas, who offers provocative assessments of the modern subject and its relationship to gender, and of the woman writer's negotiations with authority and authorship. Zayas's stories question the validity of hegemonic discourses pertaining to public expectations for the citizen, to his or her intimate life, and to the intricacies resulting from any attempt to reconcile the two. Her writing is both daring and original as it reflects developments in contemporary fiction elsewhere in Europe. Brownlee shows that Zayas exploits existing fiction models in highly literary ways and in ways that cash in on the new phenomenon of tabloid publishing, arguing that Zayas is keenly aware of the new readership that resulted from the mass-production revolution in the printing industry and of the private readers' taste for scandal. Finally, Zayas dramatizes the rethinking of the Renaissance exemplum, replacing easy interpretations with Baroque excess-in a text which, like society itself, is an intricate labyrinth that resists easy solutions and limited forms of literary and cultural representation.

Zayas's prose through a gynocentric lens. María de Zayas y Sotomayor published two volumes of novellas, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares [1637] and Desengaños amorosos [1647], which enjoyed immense popularity in her day. She has recently been reinstated as a major figure of the Spanish Golden Age. This study examines Zayas's prose through a gynocentric lens. Drawing on an extensive array of primary and secondary sources, and referring to the ideas of Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Raymond and Genette, O'Brien reflects on the interactions of Zayas's women in such relationships as friendship, sisterhood, and motherhood, analyzing these interactions through the collections as a whole, and connecting the novellas with the frame stories, an aspect of Zayas's writing which has often been overlooked by critics. EAVAN O'BRIEN is a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

Examines the works of Dona Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor and their relative literary importance. Provides a brief biography of the author, a general framework of her short stories El Jardin Enganoso and El Castigo de la Miseria, and a chapter on feminism in her work.