Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) is a legend in her native Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. She is esteemed for the artistic and intellectual quality of her wide-ranging poetry, plays, and prose writings. She is renowned for her defense of the right of women to study, to publish their scholarship, and to teach, all controversial claims…

Cervantes's "novela" creates a complex protagonist due in part to the involvement of the slaves' destructive and creative energies: a linguistic and erotic paradox. Linguistically the female slave foregrounds the historical dichotomy between "ladinos" and "bozales" and the related problematic of conversion,…

Ventura García Calderón (1886-1959) was a Peruvian man of letters and a diplomat who was at the center of the hispanophone community in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Known as a proponent of Spanish American literature, García Calderón achieved a global celebrity for his dramatic, colorful, and ironic short stories. These…

"La gran Cenobia" deals with the war between Queen Zenobia of Palmyra and the Emperor Aurelian. Calderon de la Barca draws most of his information from historical sources; the dramatist, however, changes history and adapts it to his own dramatic purpose. The theme of Fortune gives unity to the play. Aureliano is portrayed as a tyrant who, to prove…

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…