This book explores how Spanish literature from the early seventeenth to the twentieth century represents some behaviors, ideologies, and identities as perverse. Narratives of perversion, steeped in religious, legal, and scientific strictures, appropriate the language of a highly ambiguous discourse, that of monstrosity, to render visible their abhorrent and alluring qualities. My study illustrates the extent to which monstrous displays are the literary expression of the perverse.

My readings in Monstrous Displays highlight overlooked aspects of classic texts, such as sexual deviance in Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza (1631) and Darwinism in Benito Pérez Galdós's Doña Perfecta (1876). I also call attention to lesser known texts by advancing non-traditional interpretations of them. Thus, I read alternative configurations of desire in El rufián Castrucho (c.1598) and what Julia Kristeva terms abjection in the portrayal of wild men and women in Nacimiento de Ursón y Valentín (c. 1588-1595), and El animal de Hungría (c.1611-1612), Spanish Golden Age plays by Lope de Vega. In all these cases, the presence of a monstrous order of things conceals a more troubling and relevant domain of perversion. However, in the analysis of a more contemporary text, Agustín Gómez Arcos's L'agneau carnivore (1975), I show how this relationship is turned upside down. My reading of this novel of subversive desire, underscores the strategy whereby a poignantly perverse love adopts a monstrous design not because it needs to articulate unspeakable shame, but rather, because it aspires to better exhibit its overt political program.

In each of the five chapters that comprise Monstrous Displays monstrosity serves as an emblem of contradiction: its heinous and unnatural aspects are complementary to its prodigious and marvelous implications. If, as Renaissance theorists believed, the function of monsters is that of exciting or awakening our deepest curiosity, the essays in this volume respond to that challenge by aiming to decipher or, at the very least, by addressing, their signifying potential in literary texts. In achieving this end, my work draws attention to a complex pattern of signification that often goes unnoticed in texts in which monstrosity is neither a conspicuous figure nor the most salient theme.

Since the book cuts across literary genres and periods in Spanish literature, it should be of interest to a wide audience in the field of Hispanic studies. In addition, it should engage readers and scholars interested in Queer Theory and Gender Studies on account of the interpretive strategies deployed throughout it. Aside from Renaissance views on the monstrous -teratological treatises- Monstrous Displays makes use of a variety of theoretical discourses on gender and sex, such as the work of Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Marjorie Garber, and others.

The first three chapters of Monstrous Displays discuss early modern literature. Chapter one, entitled "Concealing Pleasures: Cross-dressers, Tribades, and Sodomites in Lope de Vega's El rufián Castrucho", explores the monstrosity inherent in the appropriation of the opposite sex's dress and the anxieties raised by the threat of irregular sexuality. The following chapter, "Strangers to their Kind: Wildness, Abjection and Primitivism in Nacimiento de Ursón y Valentín and El animal de Hungría", examines the advent of wildness in humans as the material result of a displaced abomination. The last essay in this section, "Viciosos Regalos: Monstrosity and Perversion in Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza", looks at incest, murder, and political turmoil as tangible evidence of an unspeakable brand of debauchery. The fourth chapter in the book is entitled "Semejante a las bestias: Reciprocal Monstering in Galdós's Doña Perfecta". It focuses on the reception of Darwinism as a perverse and monstrous ideology in late nineteenth century Spain. Finally, under the title of "Perverse Monstrosities: Strategies of Cultural Resistance in Agustín Gómez Arcos's L'agneau carnivore" sodomy and incest -carnivorous love- are studied as a singular revolutionary praxis against Francoism.

At present, this project is all but complete. An introductory essay linking the five chapters to the central thesis is still in the works. This section will bring the total number of typewritten pages to about two hundred and eighty plus bibliography.

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