Honoring the lifework of the comparative literature scholar, From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora traces artistic and cultural pathways that connect Latin American literature and culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond. The essays in this collection cover three critical fields: comparative hemispheric American literature, magical realism, and the Baroque/New World Baroque/Neobaroque. Beginning with a critical reassessment of hemispheric American studies, these essays analyze the works of a wide array of writers, such as Roberto Bolaño, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Waldo Frank, and José Lez. These chapters build upon the legacy of the scholarship done by Dr. Zamora and exemplify the pattern of literary studies that she has driven forward.

Honoring the lifework of comparatist Lois Parkinson Zamora, this collection traces artistic pathways that connect Latin American culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond. Its essays range from canonical writers like Roberto Bolaño and Gabriel García Márquez to non-canonical forms such as contemporary developments of Mexican folk Baroque.

One of Stephen T. Zamora’s former students entered law school with little idea about his future direction. He was fortunate to have a class on contracts with Zamora, Sten Gustafson writes, because “after that first year with him, my path became clear.” The professor made a topic intriguing that could easily be esoteric and tedious, and “opened my eyes to a career path that I could not have imagined otherwise.” This collection of 19 academic essays honors the memory of Dr. Stephen T. Zamora, the Leonard B. Rosenberg Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, who died unexpectedly in 2016. An international authority in the field, Zamora’s areas of expertise were international trade and investments, international banking, conflicts of laws, international economic relations, Mexican law and US-Mexico relations. In addition, he was the driving force behind the establishment of the Center for U.S. and Mexican Law, the only one of its kind at a US law school. Written by colleagues and friends, the scholarly articles included in this volume reflect Zamora’s commitment to Mexican law, education and the promotion of US-Mexico cooperation. Topics such as regulating lawyers and legal education, environmental issues and dispute settlement are covered, and articles include “Economic Sovereignty and Oil and Gas Law,” “What Should Immigration Law Become?” and “Freer Trade between the United States and the European Union?” Through this collection, Zamora’s contemporaries aim to expand his legacy and continue his life-long work as an educator, attorney and uniter of peoples.

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period. As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

In this survey of Central and South American literature, Earl E. Fitz provides the first book in English to analyze the Portuguese- and Spanish-language American canons in conjunction, uncovering valuable insights about both. Fitz works by comparisons and contrasts: the political and cultural situation at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain and Portugal; the indigenous American cultures encountered by the Spanish and Portuguese and their legacy of influence; the documented discoveries of Colón and Caminha; the colonial poetry of Mexico’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Brazil’s Gregório de Matos; culminating in a meticulous evaluation of the poetry of Nicaragua’s Rubén Darío and the prose fiction of Brazil’s Machado de Assis. Fitz, an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, contends that at the end of the nineteenth century, Latin America produced two great literary revolutions, both unique in the western hemisphere, and best understood together.

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

Drawing together for the first time original work from international specialists, this book assesses the role and character of comedy and fantasy in colonial societies from India to Ireland, Australia to Cuba, Africa to North America. There are cross-cultural comparisons and consideration of both imperial responses and colonized resistance. The book deals with oral as well as written traditions, the history of comic and fantastic discourse, visual, theatrical and literary representations as well as historical and cultural accounts.