SOURCE: Clamurro, William H. “Ideological Contradiction and Imperial Decline: Toward a Reading of Zayas's Desengaños amorosos.” South Central Review 5, no. 2 (summer 1988): 43-50.

In the essay below, Clamurro regards de Zayas's Desengaños as an example of a text that reflects the ideological crises of her times.

The fiction of María de Zayas y Sotomayor has attracted increased critical attention in recent years, in no small part as a result of the general recuperation of certain writers previously relegated to obscurity by the essentially patriarchal discourse of literary criticism. In addition, although the vagaries of literary history and its acceptances, rejections, and later reincorporations are not the subject of this present paper, the renewed interest in Zayas and her novelas is illustrative of the case of a writer popular and admired in her own time, then later all but forgotten, and finally “rediscovered”—with each turn of...