Customer Reviews

Milenio: Mil aos de literatura espaola

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As a Spanish literature graduate student, it was a struggle to find a book that was not only concise and clear but also one that contained the latest critical theory and critique on the most important works in Spanish literary history. With "Milenio", Mujica not only created this but so much more. The construction of the text goes as follows:
1.In each important period she gives a succint historical background about what is going on in the Spanish peninsula at that time

2. biographical information about the writer, including some summaries of her/his work and critiques

3. a sample of the author's major work, like poetry, acts of a play or excerpts of a book etc

4. analytical questions to help process the literary work

5. The book also has a glossary of important terms like mester de juglaria, humanismo etc

This text is an awesome supplement if you are familiar with peninsular literature but need to brush up on some authors or historical/literary movements of the time period. I highly recommend this as a must have!

For me, one of the biggest deciding factors between a good text book and a bad one is readablilty. This book is terribly hard to read. It's not in the language, but rather, how the pages are layed out. Each page has two columns of about 8 to 10 point-sized text. There is absolutely NO break in the text. I find this layout very hard to read. Also, many of the longer works are "abridged." There are tons of (...)s between parts of text. For me, this makes some of the stories hard to understand. If you are a teacher considering using this book, do your students a favor, and DON'T. If you are a student buying this book for class, good luck!