With a unique international scope, this timely text traces the impact of the ongoing Cold War on the transformation of the field of Latin American studies in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Drawing on unpublished documents, the book highlights how the new generation of academics challenged the mainstream Cold War consensus and opened the field to progressive theoretical currents. This book provides an essential foundation for new directions in the field of Latin American studies for academics and students.

The present volume is intended as a scientific conversation between pioneering research and the traditionally leading disciplines of medievalism. With that aim, the collection presents a selection of crucial essays to add to contemporary discussion which, however convergent and synchronous in approach, also pull in heterogeneous distinct ways and enhance the multiple perspectives which are currently embraced in the study of English medievalism. The chapters, fifteen in all, constitute a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at the 22nd International Conference of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature (SELIM), which brought together a large number of scholars worldwide, and was held at the Department of Modern Languages of the University of La Rioja in 2010. A brief glance at the book’s contents evinces the manifestly plural ways in which the English Middle Ages, the mesmerising media tempestas, are being addressed in current critical debate, from the diverse areas of linguistics, literature, teaching methodology and translation. In all, the book becomes exceptional witness to all these developments, being not foolhardy to predict that the dark old ages provide, as ever, foundations for stimulating new highlights and ideas.

This collection examines the intersections between the personal and the political in travel writing, and the dialectic between mobility and stasis, through an analysis of specific cases across geographical and historical boundaries. The authors explore the various ways in which travel texts represent actual political conditions and thus engage in discussions about national, transnational, and global citizenship; how they propose real-world political interventions in the places where the traveler goes; what tone they take toward political or socio-political violence; and how they intersect with political debates. Travel writing can be viewed as political in a purely instrumental sense, but, as this volume also demonstrates, travel writing’s reception and ideological interventions also transform personal and cultural realities. This book thus examines the ways in which politics’ material effects inform and intersect with personal experience in travel texts and engage with travel’s dialectic of mobility and stasis. In spite of globalization and efforts to eradicate the colonial vision in travel writing and in travel writing criticism, this vision persists in various and complex ways. While the travelogue can be a space of discursive and direct oppression, these essays suggest that the travelogue is also a narrative space in which the traveler employs the genre to assert authority over his or her experiences of mobility. This book will be an important contribution for interdisciplinary scholars with interests in travel writing studies, global and transnational studies, women’s studies, multicultural studies, the social sciences, and history.