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Passing for Spain

CERVANTES AND THE FICTIONS OF IDENTITY

Barbara Fuchs author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Illinois Press

Published:31st Dec '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Passing for Spain cover

Cervantes challenges the state's attempt to categorize its subjects by presenting characters who pass for another gender, nationality, or religion.

Passing for Spain charts the intersections of identity, nation, and literary representation in early modern Spain. Barbara Fuchs analyzes the trope of passing in Don Quijote and other works by Cervantes, linking the use of disguise to the broader historical and social context of Counter-Reformation Spain and the religious and political dynamics of the Mediterranean Basin.

In five lucid and engaging chapters, Fuchs examines what passes in Cervantes’s fiction: gender and race in Don Quijote and  “Las dos doncellas”; religion in “El amante liberal” and La gran sultana; national identity in the Persiles and “La española inglesa.” She argues that Cervantes represents cross-cultural impersonation -- or characters who pass for another gender, nationality, or religion -- as challenges to the state’s attempts to assign identities and categories to proper Spanish subjects.

Fuchs demonstrates the larger implications of this challenge by bringing a wide range of literary and political texts to bear on Cervantes’s representations. Impeccably researched, Passing for Spain examines how the fluidity of individual identity in early modern Spain undermined a national identity based on exclusion and difference.
 

REVIEWS "Highly recommended."--CHOICE ADVANCE PRAISE "Passing for Spain is a healthy sign that Renaissance scholars are finally looking to early modern Spain as a likely locus for the study of self -fashioning and the formation of the nation-state. Fuchs takes the literary breadth of the foundational Spanish writer Cervantes to examine the concept she calls passing --the deliberate impersonation of a seemingly fixed identity -- to prove just how disarmingly unfixed the markers of identity were in early modern Europe." -- Anne Cruz, professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Chicago

ISBN: 9780252027819

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 18mm

Weight: 340g

160 pages