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Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body, affect, materialism, and other axes of timely debate.

To date, the writings of Miguel de Cervantes have been oddly sidelined from larger, ongoing scholarly projects to link premodern literature with the most recent analytics of critical theory and cultural studies. Cervantine Futures addresses this conspicuous gap by highlighting creative, forward-looking, and rigorous approaches that situate Cervantes in recent theoretical developments in critical cultural studies. Conceived under the rubric of “futures”—collective and capacious, yet also subjunctive and transtemporal—this book tasks the fields of early modern Iberian and Cervantine studies with adopting a more global approach to the early modern period that surveys the current and historical landscapes while charting new horizons. Crucially, Cervantine Futures reflects upon how early modern texts, cultural modes of expression, and visual ideations from Cervantes’s life and legacy resonate with contemporary debates on gender, race, ability, and other issues. The volume thus includes scholarly provocations that deploy feminist, queer, critical race, disability studies, and new materialist approaches to Cervantes’s oeuvre—tendentiously positioned as “canonical”—with the purpose not only of scrutinizing its sociopolitical meanings, but also of creating new archives that productively reframe and rethink early modernity.

Women Rethinking Genres in Early Modern Europe brings together research rooted in both gender and genre as categories of analysis to illustrate how the two frameworks are inextricably linked in how we understand the experiences of European women who wrote between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than considering genres as prescriptive, in this collection we emphasize that genres can take different forms and are central to the ways in which authors and readers understand and perceive the world. Together, these essays in this volume demonstrate that women authors not only experimented with genres in different ways but also contributed significantly to the development and circulation of ideas in early modern Europe. This volume includes a variety of case studies from different geographical areas within Western Europe that explore the role of gender in the dissemination of genres such as dialogue, poetry, pastoral, novellas, devotional literature, epic poems, account books, scientific treatises, and fictional romances. In doing so, the essays here contribute to scholarship on marginalized and less studied aspects of early modern female culture.