Praised for its scope and depth, Asia in the Making of Europe is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history. Volume I: The Century of Discovery brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" (The New York Review of Books). Volume II: A Century of Wonder examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

Volume exploring the important but neglected Spanish female poet Angela Figuera Aymerich. Angela Figuera Aymerich (1902-84) remains an obscure figure among the Spanish social poets of the Franco regime, her work almost entirely eclipsed by male contemporaries. This book attempts both to bring her poetry to the attention of a wider audience and to show how her work anticipates the generation of women writers and poets who have emerged since the coming of democracy. Focusing primarily on a selection of poems published between 1948 and 1962, Dr Evans shows how her work has been mistakenly ignored as maternal in essence and so of little interest to the poetry of social protest in general. Using feminist and psychoanalytical theories of language to suggest that identity (andpoetic identity in particular) is constructed as the effect of mirror images, the author argues that the `moving reflections' of gender, faith and aesthetics mirror Figuera's struggle with a fragmented poetic identity; through these concepts her work can be read not only as a `moving reflection' of maternal femininity and social injustice, but as an active attempt to retrace the boundaries of female identity. JO EVANS teaches in the Departmentof Hispanic Studies, Edinburgh University.

Francisco de la Torre has long been praised as an outstanding poet in the mould of Garcilaso de la Vega and his simplicity of style and soft, gentle, Arcadian environment of his poetry have been emphasized. In this volume Professor Hughes attempts to define more accurately the position of Francisco de la Torre's verse in the evolution of Spanish poetry in the sixteenth century, revealing that Torre's vision of the pastoral world and his poetic language show him to be a transitional poet of considerable quality and substance and not merely an imitator of Garcilaso. Hughes demonstrates that while some of Torre's poetry follows a general pastoral pattern, his descriptions are characterized by a sense of movement through a shifting perspective and that even in poems with a traditional pastoral setting, the descriptions sometimes negate the pastoral qualities. The author also shows that Torre, rather than looking back towards Garcilaso and his contemporaries, is already anticipating – especially in his stylistic technique and in his view of nature – the attitude of the seventeenth century.

Flitter examines those narratives within the intellectual parameters that defined them, probing the conceptual strategies by which writers represented history.