The poetry of Juan Gelman (1930–2014) is eminently suited to an edition of BSS that simultaneously celebrates a centenary of Hispanist research in the UK and attempts to survey the current state of the field. Gelman—poet, journalist and political activist—with an oeuvre that emerges from the socially engaged verse of the 1950s, engaging with Anglophone poetry, pseudonymous translations mysticism, and culminating in the Premio Cervantes 2007. An assessment of his early work, particularly the presence of ternura therein, draws on influential work in affect theory and speaks to signal moments in the history of UK Hispanism.

This piece argues that Mexican literary and cultural studies are on the verge of a series of paradigm changes. The essay begins with an imagined walk through Mexico City to illustrate the ways in which scholarship can ‘think’ a space. The essay later proceeds to with engage three questions in the field of cultural studies in Mexico: questions of method and transdisciplinarity, subjectivities following new ways of thinking race and gender and temporalities through the idea of the future. The discussion will engage as examples leading Mexican theorists such as Irmgard Emmelhainz, Cristina Rivera Garza and Bruno Bosteels among others.

This article offers an ecocritical reading of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel Sab (1841) informed by the religious, magical beliefs attributed to the wilderness or ‘monte’ as recorded in Lydia Cabrera’s classic ethnography, El Monte (1954). It goes on to contextualize the novel within the botanical studies published in Cuba in the 1820s and 1830s, notably the work of Alexander von Humboldt and Ramón de la Sagra, to which Avellaneda may have had access through the Sociedad de los Amigos del País in Puerto Príncipe.

This essay revisits and reassesses the first major renewal of Spain’s lyric tradition led by Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega. While not pretending to discover or disclose new revelations, it regards anew the historiography of the reception by both these poets of Petrarchism, a cultural project that has by now entered the mythology of Spanish poetry. I reflect on earlier Spanish literary histories, rereading their texts alongside late twentieth-century theories of imitation and recent critical and theoretical studies of early modern poetic production to sketch a brief trajectory of the shifting contours of Spanish Renaissance poetry and poetics.

In the early-modern Iberian world, people of African descent engaged in festive practices both in isolation and as part of wider religious and civic communities. Based on contemporary chronicles, festival accounts and visual sources, our knowledge of these practices remains partial, both because contemporary writers and artists were largely non-Black and because these authors and artists inscribed these traditions within the Eurocentric exotic genre. In this article, I turn to festival accounts, government reports and visual sources, discuss the challenges and opportunities they present and develop diasporic, transgeographic and transtemporal methodologies allowing us to identify continuities across the Afro-Iberian diaspora.

This article offers close readings of four audio-visual works, covering two genres, urban comedy and rural tragedy, with two examples each. Mariano Ozores’ popular farce Sor Metiche/Unos granujas decentes (1980), anticipates Almodóvar’s dramedy Entre tinieblas (1983) in its convent location and juxtaposition of a nun and a showgirl. Mario Camus’ literary adaptation Los santos inocentes (1984), located in a wealthy Francoist household obsessed with hunting, is reframed by Manolo Caro as the Netflix original Alguien tiene que morir (2020). This article also appeals to Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, the anti-retro, and his writings on film.

ABSTRACT The sermon that Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) devoted to St Bartholomew offers an insight into her deep-seated and longstanding attachment to the saint as well as the transcendence of traditional boundaries and categories. Flaying, appraised as a metaphor capable of counterpointing the distinction between container and contained, destabilizes perceptions of identity, shedding light on both Juana’s androgyny and the complexity of the relationship between Christ and the Virgin. It thereby becomes possible to build on advances in queer theory, approaching the sermon in terms of the gender-fluid dynamism of pious identification.

This article analyses Mexican poet Homero Aridjis’ 1985 novel 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla, set in Spain between 1391 and 1492 during a time of increased persecution and the subsequent expulsion of the Sephardic Jews, narrated by the converso Juan Cabezón. It examines questions of identity, Otherness and social criticism through the lens of the ‘poética comprometida de la picaresca’ and highlights the continued contemporary significance of these topics in the twenty-first century.

This article is an examination of the poetry and prose composed initially for the beatification and canonization of Teresa of Ávila and later in efforts to name her co-patron of Spain. The so-called Teresianistas included Cervantes, Lope and Góngora as well as the Discalced Carmelite sisters Cecilia del Nacimiento and María de San Alberto. In opposition was Quevedo, who defended Santiago’s singularity as patron. The present study juxtaposes the arguments for and against co-patronage of Saint Teresa and exposes the underlying misogyny of Quevedo in contrast to the nascent feminism of the Teresianistas.