In this collection of 65 short poems, Roberta Quance exemplifies the range, vitality and inner mysticism of work by one of Spain’s foremost, if controversial, contemporary female poets, drawing on the contents of a number of Spanish collections.

In this collection of 65 short poems, Roberta Quance exemplifies the range, vitality and mysticism of work by one of Spain's foremost, if controversial, contemporary female poets, drawing on the contents of a number of Spanish collections. In Atencia's poetry the poetic subject is often seen as someone who occupies an interior space, either crossing over the threshold from the outside world to an inner one (a garden, a house, a castle), or moving from the inner, home space to one even more interior: the world of dreams and imagination and hope, which can project outward into liminal spaces of the sky or the sea. A very basic paradox of Christian mystical experience – of abasement and magnification – haunts Atencia's work. She has made her own one of its fundamental tenets: the purging of self, the shedding of all trace of worldly attachment in order to 'make room' for experience of a different reality: the self's sense of 'nothingness' in the face of beauty is a prized moment in and of itself; it is sublime. Atencia's definitive manner: classically shaped verse in the tradition of the 'pure poetry' of the Generation of 1927, which makes myth of a womanly self, is amply explored in this first major English edition of her work to appear since 1987. Roberta Quance is Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University Belfast. She is author of books on mythology and modernity in modern literature and desire in the poetry of Lorca as well as articles on women writers and artists associated with the Generation of 1927 and translations of work by Carlos Piera.

This book takes a probing look at how Spanish poets of the twentieth century read objects of visual art, write poems that utilize the discursive strategy known as ekphrasis, and how, in turn, they are read by those texts. As a result of their reading practices, the artistic works "read" by the poets are inscribed in the poets' own texts, and in a variety of ways. This analysis sheds light on the poets' own distinctive stance toward many primary issues, such as textuality, representation, language, power, ideology, literature, and art.

The study emphasizes the role of the arts and humanities in the re-plotting of gender and also links cultural production to political circumstances, specifically to the end of the Franco dictatorship and the transitional to a new democracy in Spain. The inclusion of both the visual art of Marina Núnez and art photographs as well as literary authors and dramatists offers views of overarching motifs in the cultural production of Spain. The book includes an historical component, with an analysis of works by major nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spanish poets, including Espronceda, Bécquer, Villaspesas, Lorca, and the pioneer female author Blanca de los Rios. The list of writers from the 1970s forward includes both highly recognized figures, Clara Janés, María Victoria Atencia, Eduardo Quiles and an extensive group of important writers less recognized beyond among critics.

This text offers detailed studies of eight works of poetry written by Spanish women in the years following the death of Francisco Franco and the evolution of a democratic government. Each chapter shows how each author defines herself both as a woman and a poet by portraying a female figure in the text of the poem.

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.