Tales of Seduction

Don Juan is one of the intriguing creations of Western literature. A subject of countless revisions over the centuries, he seems a perpetual source of fascination. In the popular imagination he exists as the legendary seducer of women, charismatic rogue and trickster. A potent icon of male sexual energy, he crosses cultures, from east to west.The twentieth-century has viewed the figure afresh through the prism of its own cultural terms of reference and social concerns. Using an interdisciplinary approach, "Tales of Seduction" focuses on those fascinating intersections between myth, culture and intellectual inquiry, yielding new connections. Don Juan is a figure of transnational and transcultural interest. Sarah Wright takes Don Juan back to Spain and examines the confluences of Spanish culture with aspects of Western intellectual history. Intellectually promiscuous, transgressive and iconoclastic, Don Juan constantly plays at the limits of culture. Whilst Don Juan's antecedents lie in tales of blasphemy or repentance, by the twentieth-century the figure often takes on explorations into the limits of gender as a framework for other, more general, questions about the limits of culture.Wright explores how Don Juan has entered into and been received in different ways in aspects of Spanish culture (opera, cinema, theatre, photography and virtual realities) and Western theory (nationhood, medicine, psychoanalysis, consumerism) in the twentieth century and at the start of the twenty-first.

Sarah Wright is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge.