ABSTRACT

This collection of essays brings together a wide range of Spanish and Portuguese academics and writers exploring the ways in which our encounters with literatures in English inform our assumptions about texts and identities (or texts as identities) and the way we read them. Mapping, examining, reading and re-reading, fashioning and self-fashioning and, especially, weaving appear as appropriate images that convey the complexity and the nature of creative writing. Such a metaphor has been fundamental for the history of world literature since the Roman poet Ovid had included a tale in his Metamorphoses in which weaving, narration, uncertain identities, and the risks of telling uncomfortable truths all figure prominently. As such, these essays trace the intertwined patterns that knit texts together, weaving identities as well as undoing them and, in the process, interrogating established and official truths.

chapter 1|17 pages

Urizen now

Reading anew William Blake's response to his times

chapter 3|16 pages

(Re)reading classical mythology through the Aztec gods

Cherríe Moraga's lesbian Mexican Medea

chapter 4|17 pages

From influence to response

Angela Carter's selected novels come to terms with William Shakespeare's tragedies

chapter 5|13 pages

P.D. James' The Black Tower

“Almost Iris Murdoch with murders in it”?

chapter 6|20 pages

Romanticism and heteronymic theory

John Keats and the poetics of Fernando Pessoa

chapter 8|17 pages

Non Angli, sed angeli

The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons and the Dawn of Englishness

chapter 11|16 pages

A transmodern reading of Joanna Kavenna's Zed

Digital reason and the attempt to transcend Cartesian dialectics

chapter 12|15 pages

Hospitable loci

The spatialization of oppositional world views in eighteenth-century women's writings

chapter 13|16 pages

“Rememberest Thou Me?”

Violent women in Louisa Medina Hamblin's “The Panorama of Life”

chapter 15|14 pages

Instapoetry and the transmodern paradigm

Transnational feminism in Nikita Gill's work 1