Reclaiming the Body

In a time when few women in Europe were educated and even fewer spoke out against the status quo María de Zayas (1590-?) published novellas filled with criticism about gender relations. Her best-selling <i>Novelas amorosas</i> (1637) and <i>Desengaños amorosos</i> (1647) explore the pleasures and more frequently the perils of sex and marriage. Condemned as lewd Zayas's work was excised from the literary canon by nineteenth-century scholars. But with the feminist revolution of the 1970s came a renewed interest in her fiction. Zayas's contemporary appeal is easily explained: through graphic images of violence against women and poignant examples of women's exclusion from social justice she speaks to important issues of our own times.<br/><br/>Lisa Vollendorf illuminates this compelling author using contemporary feminist theory to decipher the nuances of Zayas's complex ideologies. Revealing Zayas as a critical figure in European women's literary history Vollendorf delineates the strategies and impulses behind early modern feminism.