Maria Willstedt Address and Phone: Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics Florida State University 309 Diffenbaugh Building Tallahassee, FL 32306-1540 850-644-1197 (Office) 850-644-0524 (Fax) mwillste@fsu.edu (Email) Office Hours

Maria Willstedt

Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Yale University) - My research is focused on two main areas of inquiry. The first one is the medieval framed-tale narrative tradition and its subsequent development in Golden Age literature and beyond. I am particularly interested in the meaning, function, and form of these tales, especially their relationship with popular or folklore traditions. My focus here has mainly been on Cervantes and María de Zayas. Other genres that interest me in the same light are romances, popular hagiographies, exempla, and that host of short narratives that went under the various names of patrañas, novelas, and cuentos, which could be found alone or ubiquitously embedded in longer texts of all sorts. I am interested in exploring the ways in which these genres bridged the gap between oral and literary culture, learned and popular, local vs. pan-European, Eastern and Western, Christian and other religious traditions, in order to convey a meaningful message to the listener/reader.

My second area of research is medievalism, understood as post-medieval interest in the Spanish Middle Ages. The analysis of medievalism as a cultural and political phenomenon is a particularly apt approach for understanding the shaping of the concept of nation in Spain, especially with regards to its multicultural past. Here my focus has been on analyzing the shifting place that Spain’s medieval literary texts held in the eighteenth-century. My book project is centered on the royal librarian Tomás Antonio Sánchez, the first scholar to publish a major European medieval vernacular epic poem, the Poem of the Cid. I use his editorial project, the publication of a Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV (1779-90), which saw the first editions of not only the Poem of the Cid, but also of the Libro de buen amor, the Libro de Alexandre, and all but one of Berceo’s poems, as the central narrative thread of a broad cultural history of Enlightenment Spain seen from the perspective of its interest in reassessing the past.

Courses 2008-09

• SPN 3332 Communication in Language and Culture I
• SPW 3030 Approaching Hispanic Literature
• SPW 3103 Readings from Early Iberia (ca. 1000 to 1700 AD)
• SPW 4140 The Poetics of Hispanic Love and Violence

Other Courses

• SPN3333 Communication in Language and Culture II
• SPW 4930 Studies in Hispanic Literature: Don Quijote
• SPN 5845 History of the Spanish Language
• SPW 5405 Medieval Framed Narratives
• SPW 5405 Approaches to the Medieval Canon