Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture

Don Juan is one of the intriguing creations of Western literature. A legendary seducer of women, trickster, and transgressor of sacred boundaries, he has been the object of countless revisions over the centuries. 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 the intersections between myth, culture, and intellectual inquiry. Sarah Wright takes Don Juan back to Spain, his birth-place, and examines the confluences of Spanish culture with aspects of Western intellectual history (medicine, psychoanalysis, linguistics), where she finds Don Juan continues to transgress the limits of culture from the early twentieth century to the present.