Title Dressed to kill : death and meaning in Zayas's Desengaños / Elizabeth Rhodes

Published Toronto [Ont.] : University of Toronto Press, ©2011 (Saint-Lazare, Quebec : Canadian Electronic Library, 2012)

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 234 pages) : illustrations, portraits, digital file Contents Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 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 -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y -- Z Summary "The noble wives in María de Zayas's Desengaños 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 Desengaños 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 Desengaños' intriguing influence on the aesthetic base of Gothic literature by revealing that its authors were avid readers of Zayas."--Pub. desc Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-224) and index Notes Includes some text in Spanish Subject Zayas y Sotomayor, María de, 1590-1650. Parte segunda del sarao y entretenimientos honestos. English. Zayas y Sotomayor, María de 1590-1661 SUBJECT Parte segunda del sarao y entretenimientos honestos (Zayas y Sotomayor, María de) fast Subject Death in literature. Meaning (Philosophy) in literature. Women in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- Spanish & Portuguese. Death in literature Meaning (Philosophy) in literature Women in literature Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9781442696242 1442696249

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