A Translation of Don Juan Valera's Morsamor


Book Description

Translated into English, the novel Morsamor is set in 1521. Morsamor is a young Spaniard whose name is the combination of the Latin words for Death and Love. He is accompanied by a lay brother serving him as a squire, and who is skilled with many attributes that facilitate Morsamor's successes. They sail from Lisbon to circumnavigate the world by going east. The bulk of the novel is the story of their many adventures. Later, Morsamor wakes back in the monastery an old man nearing death, wondering if his dreams were real or imagined, and with the desire to cleanse his soul.




The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe


Book Description

Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.







The Representation of Women in the Novels of Juan Valera


Book Description

In The Representation of Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: A Feminist Critique, Teresia Taylor's text-oriented essay analyzes the role of major female characters in Valera's eight full-length novels. Giving equal attention to the less commonly studied novels, these are organized in four pairs based on similar representations of women (for example, Pepita Jimenez and Dona Luz compare two women who love "priests").










Juanita la Larga


Book Description

"Juanita la Larga (1896) unfolds in a small town in nineteenth-century Spain and tells the story of a young girl's romance with a wealthy widower many years her senior. Appearing here for the first time in English, Valera's novel describes in detail life in an Andalusian hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.




The Illusions of Doctor Faustino


Book Description

"Don Faustino Lopez de Mendoza, scion of an illustrious but impoverished family of the highest nobility, believes himself destined for great accomplishments in the literary world, sees himself as a poet of the first rank, and immerses himself in grand, if not grandiose, illusions. While living in a provincial Andalusian town and dreaming of triumphing in Madrid's artistic circles, Faustino embarks on a discovery of love with three women. How he extricates himself from each relationship and meets his sad end constitutes the denouement of this searching novel that depicts the deleterious effects of the Romantic malaise that swept through western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.




Juan Valera, by Cyrus DeCoster


Book Description