Weaving Tales

This collection of essays brings together a wide range of Spanish and Portuguese academics and writers exploring the ways in which our encounters with literatures in English inform our assumptions about texts and identities (or texts as identities) and the way we read them. Mapping, examining, reading and re-reading, fashioning and self-fashioning and, especially, weaving appear as appropriate images that convey the complexity and the nature of creative writing. Such a metaphor has been fundamental for the history of world literature since the Roman poet Ovid had included a tale in his Metamorphoses in which weaving, narration, uncertain identities, and the risks of telling uncomfortable truths all figure prominently. As such, these essays trace the intertwined patterns that knit texts together, weaving identities as well as undoing them and, in the process, interrogating established and official truths.

Paula García-Ramírez is Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She is a specialist in English-speaking postcolonial literature, with particular attention to African literature. Within this field of research, she has published several studies on authors including Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, among others.

Beatriz Valverde Jiménez is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Philology at the Universidad de Jaén. She has been a visiting researcher at Loyola University Chicago, Georgetown University and Boston College. She has published articles in journals such as English Studies, and European Journal of English Studies, and with Mark Bosco (Georgetown University) has also edited Reading Flannery O'Connor in Spain: From Andalusia to Andalucía (2020).

Angélica Varandas is Assistant Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Department of English Studies of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon where she also teaches Fantasy Literature and Science Fiction in English and English Descriptive Linguistics. Her main area of research is English Medieval Literature and Culture as well as medievalism. She co-edited the book From Manuscript to Digital in 2020. She is also the author of two books published in 2012, Mitos e Lendas Celtas: Irlanda and Mitos e Lendas Celtas: País de Gales. With a colleague, she has just published the first Portuguese critical edition of the translation of Beowulf from the Old English (Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 2022). At the moment, she is the Principal Investigator of the research project English Studies Literature at ULICES (University of Lisbon Center for English Studies) and she is a member of the Executive Board of the same Research Center.

Jason Whittaker is a Professor in the College of Arts at the University of Lincoln. He specializes in Romantic literature and the reception of William Blake, and his most recent books include Divine Images: The Life and Work of William Blake (2021) and Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (2022).