Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.

"Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the "cozy" novel."

With its focus on recent detective series featuring female investigators, this collection analyzes the authors’ treatment of current social, political and economic problems in Spain and beyond, in addition to exploring interrelations between gender, globalization, the environment and technology. The contributions here reveal the varied ways in which the use of a series allows for a deeper consideration of such issues, in addition to permitting the more extensive development of the protagonist investigator and her reactions to, and methods of, dealing with personal and professional challenges of the twenty-first century. In these stories, the authors employ strategies that break with long-standing conventions, developing crime fiction in unexpected ways, incorporating elements of science fiction, the supernatural, and the historical novel, as well as varied geographical settings (small towns, provincial cities, and rural communities) beyond the urban environment, all of which contributes to the reinvigoration of the genre.

This book examines postmodern parody in Latin American literature as the intersection between ideology construction and deconstruction. Parody’s chief task is to deconstruct and criticize the ideologies behind previous texts. During this process, new ideologies are inevitably constructed. However, postmodernism simultaneously recognizes the partiality of all ideologies and rejects their enthronement as absolute truth. This raises the question of how postmodern parody deals with the paradox inherent in its own existence on the threshold between ideology construction/deconstruction and the rejection of ideology. This book explores the relationship between parody and ideology, as well as this paradox of postmodern parody in works written by writers ranging from early twentieth-century poets to the most recent novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Mario Vargas Llosa. The analyses include such authors as Cristina Peri Rossi, Manuel Puig, Luisa Valenzuela, Enrique Sánchez, Roberto Bolaño, Claudia Piñeiro, Margarita Mateo Palmer, Boris Salazar and Rosario Ferré.

Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia, royal treatises, agricultural reports, paintings, satirical essays, horror fiction and film, young adult and speculative literature, poetry, graphic novels, and television series. The authors contend that Spanish cultural studies must expose the material historicity that entangles today’s ecological crises and ecosocial injustices with previous, future, and contemporary entities. The book argues that this will require the simultaneous decentring of the human and of the Anthropocene as an ecocritical framework. By standardizing ecosocial analysis and widening avenues for ecopedagogical approaches, Beyond Human participates in the ecocentric transformation of Hispanic cultural studies.

Offering in-depth analyses of fifteen different queer films from the Iberian Peninsula, this collection shows how a diverse group of filmmakers from regions including Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country have produced films that challenge the region's conservative religious values and gender norms, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.