A seventeenth-century writer of sensationalist short stories, María de Zayas was a bestselling author, steeped in the novella traditions of Italy and France as well as her native Spain. At the same time, she was an important player in the tabloid craze sweeping over the Europe of her day. Marina S. Brownlee recontextualizes María de Zayas and provides a reading of Zayas's work from the double perspective of narratology and feminism. In doing so Brownlee explores the complexities of human subjectivity and its representation in the writings of Zayas, who offers provocative assessments of the modern subject and its relationship to gender, and of the woman writer's negotiations with authority and authorship. Zayas's stories question the validity of hegemonic discourses pertaining to public expectations for the citizen, to his or her intimate life, and to the intricacies resulting from any attempt to reconcile the two. Her writing is both daring and original as it reflects developments in contemporary fiction elsewhere in Europe. Brownlee shows that Zayas exploits existing fiction models in highly literary ways and in ways that cash in on the new phenomenon of tabloid publishing, arguing that Zayas is keenly aware of the new readership that resulted from the mass-production revolution in the printing industry and of the private readers' taste for scandal. Finally, Zayas dramatizes the rethinking of the Renaissance exemplum, replacing easy interpretations with Baroque excess-in a text which, like society itself, is an intricate labyrinth that resists easy solutions and limited forms of literary and cultural representation.

Las novelas italianizantes de María de Zayas, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637) y Segunda parte del sarao o entretenimiento honesto, hoy más conocida como Desengaños amorosos (1647), han suscitado gran interés en la crítica que las percibe dentro del feminismo temprano. Sin embargo, en Cartografía social en la narrativa de María de Zayas, la autora propone que el proyecto que Zayas lleva a cabo en su obra va más allá del proyecto de defensa de la mujer: los mapas sociales, los tratados del comportamiento y referencias a la empresa colonial, conjuntamente con los cuerpos femeninos, aluden de modo simbólico al cuerpo político y de hecho encubren una crítica al gobierno del Conde Duque de Olivares. Las reflexiones de Zayas sobre la educación de la mujer y, de modo indirecto, sobre la prostitución, apelan a la reforma de las costumbres del arbitrismo del siglo XVII y llenan un hueco en lo que parecería ser una tradición política femenina.

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590-1650?) published two collections of novellas, Novelas amorosas y exemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647), which were immensely popular in her day. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and bourgeois sensibilities exiled her "scandalous" works to the outer fringes of serious literature. Over the last two decades, however, she has gained an enthusiastic and ever-expanding readership, drawing intense critical attention and achieving canonical status as a major figure of the Spanish Golden Age. In this first comprehensive study of Zayas's prose, Margaret R. Greer explores the relationship between narration and desire, analyzing both the "desire for readers" displayed by Zayas in her Prologue and the sexual desire that drives the telling within the novellas themselves. Greer examines Zayas's narrative strategies through the twin lenses of feminist and psychoanalytic theory. She devotes close attention to the weight of Renaissance literary traditions and the role of Zayas's own cultural context in shaping her work. She discusses Zayas's biography and the reception of her publications; her advocacy of women's rights; her conflictive loyalty to an aristocratic, patriarchal order; her crafting of feminine tales of desire; and her erasure of the frontiers between the natural and supernatural, indeed, between love and death itself. In so doing, Greer offers an expansive analysis of this recently rediscovered Golden Age writer.