Syphilis was a prevalent affliction in the era of the Americas’ colonization, creating widespread anxiety that is indicated in the period’s literature across numerous fields. Reflecting Spaniards’ political prejudices of the period, it was alternately labeled "mal francés" or "el mal de las Indias." Sifilografía offers a cultural history that traces syphilis and its consequences in the transatlantic Spanish-speaking world throughout the long eighteenth century. Juan Carlos González Espitia charts interrelated literary, artistic, medical, and governmental discourses, exploring how fears of the disease and the search for its cure mobilized a transoceanic dialogue that forms an underside of Enlightenment narratives of progress. Through a narrative revealing the transformation and retooling of ideas related to syphilis as a bodily contagion, González Espitia demonstrates the Spanish-speaking world’s crucial relevance to a global understanding of the period in the context of current reassessments of Enlightenment thought. Broad in its scope, the book incorporates an extensive corpus of medical treatises, literary essays, poems, novels, art, and governmental documents. The rich overlapping matrix of authors and texts broached subvert the idea of a homogeneous interpretation of syphilis and contributes to the rediscovery of the wide-ranging historical, cultural, and philosophical impact of this disease in the Spanish-speaking world. Sifilografía seeks to open a productive dialogue with other area studies about the disparate meanings of science and Enlightenment.

Who writes "I"? To whom are autobiographies addressed? What kinds of readers are inscribed in autobiographical narratives? In Apology to Apostrophe, James D. Fernández's offers a lucid and powerful meditation on the nature of autobiographical writing through his investigation of the historical conditions and literary stagings of autobiographical writing in Spain. As Fernández demonstrates, recent developments in critical theory provide new and fruitful approaches to autobiographical works that have long been neglected, misunderstood, or, in some cases, virtually unknown. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on nineteenth-century Spain, Fernández exposes a rhetorical tension that often occurs in autobiographical discourse, between self-justification, or "apology," and the transcendence of this worldly impulse, or "apostrophe." This tension, he argues, is of particular interest in the case of Spain, but not peculiar to that nation, and his attention to the theoretical nature of autobiography leads to insightfl considerations of many canonical European autobiographies, including those of Saint Augustine, Rousseau, Saint Teresa, and Cardinal Newman. Considering Spanish autobiography in the context of first-person narrative in Europe and in the terms of current debates on the relationship between writing and selfhood, Apology to Apostrophe marks a significant advance in our historical understanding and critical discussion of the genre. The book will be of great value not only to Hispanists but also to those interested in autobiography and cultural history.

Nearly as global in its ambition and sweep as its subject, Franco Moretti's The Novel is a watershed event in the understanding of the first truly planetary literary form. A translated selection from the epic five-volume Italian Il Romanzo (2001-2003), The Novel's two volumes are a unified multiauthored reference work, containing more than one hundred specially commissioned essays by leading contemporary critics from around the world. Providing the first international comparative reassessment of the novel, these essential volumes reveal the form in unprecedented depth and breadth--as a great cultural, social, and human phenomenon that stretches from the ancient Greeks to today, where modernity itself is unimaginable without the genre. By viewing the novel as much more than an aesthetic form, this landmark collection demonstrates how the genre has transformed human emotions and behavior, and the very perception of reality. Historical, statistical, and formal analyses show the novel as a complex literary system, in which new forms proliferate in every period and place. Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world. These books will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literature.