Elizabeth Rhodes

Dressed to Kill

Death and Meaning in Zaya's Desengaños

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The noble wives in Mar¿de Zayas's Desenga¿os suffer terrible fates: one is beheaded, another poisoned, one is cemented into a chimney, while yet another is locked into a tiny wall closet where she dies. The hallmark of Zayas's aesthetics, these characters are the central reason why her fiction has increased in popularity through the ages. Yet their stories pose an apparent contradiction between the author's pro-female rhetoric and her gusto for killing model women, then beautifying their mutilated cadavers. Dressed to Kill reconciles Zayas's Desenga¿os with the age in which it was written, contextualizing the book in baroque poetics, the Spanish honour code, and fifteenth-century martyr saints' lives. Elizabeth Rhodes elegantly uncovers Zayas's intention to reform the Spanish nobility by displaying noble misbehaviour and its deadly consequences. Her book concludes by detailing the Desenga¿os' intriguing influence on the aesthetic base of Gothic literature by revealing that its authors were avid readers of Zayas.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Toronto Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Dezember 2011
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9781442643505
• ISBN-10: 1442643501
• Artikelnr.: 33641671

Autorenporträt

Elizabeth Rhodes is a professor of Hispanic Studies in the Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures at Boston College, MA.

Inhaltsangabe

Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Setting the Interpretative Baseline
1. The Desengaños at a Distance
2. Attending the Soirée
3  Dressed to Kill: Death and Meaning in the Desengaños
4 Dead End: The Convent
5 Postscript: Laurela
Conclusion
Plot Summaries
Notes
Works Cited
Index