Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion

By María de Zayas y Sotomayor and Margaret R. Greer

At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes.  But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9780226768670

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Reviews for Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion

[bethie9paige · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was much better than I thought it was going to be considering it was the first book I had to read for university. I also have never read any Spanish literature before. I loved the style of writing that allowed for the ballads that expressed deeper emotions. I also loved the way the book was a festival with the stories being part of that festival. Like a story inside a story inside another story. It was a great way to set up a collection of short stories.
The second half of the book "Tales of Disillusion" was a lot darker than the first half "Tales of Love" where the stories had relatively happy endings. Especially 'Forewarned but Fooled' which was just plain witty and I've recounted it to a few friends and we've laughed over it. The 'Fifth Tale of Disillusion' was my favourite out of the selected tales in the second half because of the graphic description of Dona Ines after six years. It painfully describes the torments she experienced even though she was an innocent women.
The writing was beautiful and even though it took me longer than other books I throughly enjoyed it. After reading the descriptions of the other 'Tales of Disillusion" in the footnotes towards the end of the book, I kinda wish I could've read all of them.