Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World

"This is a timely collection of essays that provides students and scholars of early modernity with new perspectives and insights on the importance of shipwrecks as a major cultural and political event. For all the authors in the volume, a shipwreck is the unavoidable partner of empire and colonial expansion, signaling the perilous path of conquest and at the same time revealing the fissures of the entire imperial enterprise. Going beyond rhetoric, the volume argues for a more comprehensive approach to shipwrecks, defined as significant cultural events that expose not only the precarious nature of imperial expansion and colonial rule, but also issues related to gender, sexuality, identity, and morality."

~Luis Avilés, author of Avatares de lo invisible: Espacio y subjetividad en los Siglos de Oro

"Rodríguez-Guridi and Ruiz's Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World is an excellent example of the rich interdisciplinary orientation that prevails in the field of Early Modern Hispanic Studies, providing fertile ground for in-depth analyses on resistance to Spanish conquest and colonization."

~Raúl Marrero-Fente, author of Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia

"Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World is perhaps the only English-language collection of essays structured around this central theme or metaphor in recent times. Now that a number of literary critics, cultural studies scholars, and historians are working on maritime matters in the Spanish-speaking world, the chapters of this book offer a distinctive way of looking at topics relevant to these scholars and to early modernists, generally."

~Elizabeth Davis, author of Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain

“Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World offers a fresh view of an old process that goes back to the beginnings of civilization, making a new analysis of events that usually fall under the scope of economy or personal tragedy, as shipwrecks are.”
  ~New West Indian Guide

“Given present-day interests in media archaeology, ecocriticism, and new materialisms, Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World offers an especially generative topic for study.” ~Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures