Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University (1974). Chancellor's Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature. Research includes Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla (2006); an edition of Lope de Vega’s El caballero de Olmedo (2004); “Never-ending Adventure”: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature in Honor of Peter N. Dunn, ed. with Harlan Sturm (2002); El cuento: Arte y análisis (2002); Wit's End: An Adaptation of Lope de Vega's La dama boba (2000); A Society on Stage: Essays on Spanish Golden Age Drama, ed. with H. J. Manzari and Donald D. Miller (1998); Brave New Words: Studies in Spanish Golden Age Literature, ed. with Catherine Larson (1996); Magical Parts: Approaches to Don Quixote, ed. with James A. Parr (1994); "Otro cantará": Approaches to the Spanish Baroque, ed. (1992); The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (1987); Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica, with L. Teresa Valdivieso and Carmelo Virgillo (1983; 5th ed., 2003); The Unifying Concept: Approaches to Cervantes' Comedias (1981). Guest editor for special numbers of Hispania (2004), Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies (2005), and Calíope (2006).
My research has centered on early modern Spanish literature, with special emphasis on Cervantes, picaresque narrative, and the Comedia. I am interested in how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish texts play against tradition and, at the same time, establish directions for future creation. I particularly am struck by the ways in which writers, notably Cervantes, anticipate the preoccupations of contemporary theory. As they establish new modes of fiction, Cervantes and the authors of picaresque narratives find access to social and ideological centers from the margins. While they point the way toward narrative realism, they also mirror—paradoxically and precociously—modernist and postmodernist responses to realism. Golden Age drama and poetry create their own, and equally engaging, dialectics of politics and rhetoric, centers and margins.
My work in comparative literature has given me the chance to explore such topics as antiheroes and antiheroines in literature and film, metafiction, seventeenth-century European drama, and the development of the novel.
It has been my pleasure to teach literature courses for undergraduates, graduate students, and participants in the Master of Liberal Arts and Science program.
Currently I am editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, and in January of 2004 I completed a three-year term as president of the Cervantes Society of America.
