Literature gives access to the verge, to the place where the full terror of falling is felt even as both feet remain on the ground. Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown offers instruction to readers who want to know and feel their way beyond disciplinary conventions toward new understandings of how and why both empires and texts shiver and fall. In these highly original and engaging essays in contemporary Hispanic Studies, readers will encounter a treasure trove of writers—from Freud and Joyce to Gertrude Stein and Monty Python—who have written about empire, panic, and pain, with allusions to Spain and all things Spanish.

Mary Gossy is associate professor of women’s and gender studies, as well as Spanish and comparative literature, at Rutgers University. She is the author of Freudian Slips: Woman, Writing, the Foreign Tongue, among other volumes.