Nicolás Guillén's "El gran zoo" (1967), illustrated by Fayad Jamís, was the first Hispanic bestiary to prominently feature humans in a space traditionally inhabited by beasts. Guillén's verses transform the bestiary from a didactic tool used for centuries to instruct and uniform society into a subversive text that openly denounces the…

Cristina Fernández Cubas's short story "La nueva vida" ("La habitación de Nona" 2015) foregrounds the play between truth and fiction, past and present, and death and identity, where the widowed protagonist finds meaning not in philosophy, but in physics. Widowed in 2007 at age 62, Fernández Cubas focalized this story through…

In 1623, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a parish priest in Atenango, Mexico, was commissioned by his archbishop to record Nahua beliefs and healing practices for the purpose of denouncing their superstitions and demonic magic. His "Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain," 1629…

On the eighth of October, 1622, Lope de Vega finished "La nueva victoria de don Gonzalo de Córdoba." This "comedia" recounts a Spanish victory in the Battle of Fleurus, one of several military triumphs that encouraged hope and excitement during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The battle had occurred in late August of…

This article examines the life and work of Mary J. Serrano (1840-1923), a successful translator and popularizer of Spanish literature in late nineteenth-century United States. It provides a short biography of Serrano and focuses on her work for the Spanish Legation in in Washington D.C. during the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98), a period of…

Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, a seventeenth-century writer and native of New Spain, so excelled at the craft of writing "comedias" that he is recognized as one of the great writers of early modern Spain. In his personal life Ruiz de Alarcón struggled with a significant bodily impairment, a large hump on both his back and front, which made him…

This article examines poetry written during the Spanish Civil War that reflects on the modern character of the conflict: the novel tactic of aerial bombing civilian populations as it was disseminated through the mass media. A comparative reading of this body of poetry written by Spanish, British, and American authors allows for the examination of…

The long-running Spanish television program "Cuéntame cómo pasó" represents not only a wildly successful series for Radio Televisión Española, but also an excellent example of the project of historical memory. Premiering in 2001 (but set, in the first season, in 1968), the story of the multigenerational Alcántara family forms a…

Very little research has been conducted on the effects of CLIL on L1 competence development. This article compares CLIL and non-CLIL learners' levels of attainment in Spanish Language and Literature in seven public schools in the South of Spain. Learners' verbal intelligence and motivation were previously matched in order to homogenise the sample.…

"Atlas de Geografía Humana" constitutes a critique of the much vaunted notion of a progressive Spain that has rectified the gender inequalities of the Francoist era, as one of the highly educated and successful protagonists, Fran, unwittingly adopts her mother's alignment with patriarchal norms. This novel elucidates the incompatibility…

Much of the limited scholarship dedicated to Sor Juana's "autos sacramentales" tends to separate them from the "loas" that were meant to introduce them. Critics often exalt the "loas" for the sympathy that they express for indigenous beliefs, while neglecting the "autos" or viewing them as masterful…

This article reports on the integration of leadership studies into upper-level foreign language literature classes in German and Spanish in two undergraduate programs--a military university (USAFA) and a civilian university (UNC Charlotte). Taking into account ACTFL's [American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages] 21st Century Skills Map…

The article analyzes the portrayal of the male perpetrator of heterosexual domestic violence in a selection of contemporary Spanish texts (novel, drama, and autobiography) that form part of a clearly discernible cultural response to the issue of intimate partner violence in Spain today. It reads the figure of the abuser in conjunction with a range…

This essay seeks to provide parallel and interchangeable approaches to teaching Ramon del Valle-Inclan's challenging play "Luces de bohemia". A greater understanding of the cultural and mental frameworks of the early twentieth-century Spanish spectator will permit students to penetrate the dense intertextuality that characterizes Valle's…

Introduction: This paper studies the situation of research on Catalan literature between 1976 and 2003 by carrying out a bibliometric and social network analysis of PhD theses defended in Spain. It has a dual aim: to present interesting results for the discipline and to demonstrate the methodological efficacy of scientometric tools in the…