Ailén Cruz – författare

The fox is cunning, the lion is brave. These familiar ideas span back to the medieval bestiary – short, animal-centred texts, often illustrated, used to disseminate Christian teachings in medieval society. Translated into dozens of languages, bestiaries were wildly popular until the twelfth century.After centuries of obscurity, six of Latin America’s most prominent writers – Juan José Arreola, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicolás Guillén, Augusto Monterroso, Pablo Neruda, and José Emilio Pacheco – took up the bestiary during the experimental Latin American avant-garde and Boom periods. From Griffin to Axolotl presents the bestiary as a distinct genre within Hispanic literature, examining its resurgence in the contemporary canon. Analyzing a corpus of over eighty bestiaries collected through field research in Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, Ailén Cruz explores the evolutions of the genre. Reimagined through both prose and art, and moving beyond religious teachings, these bestiaries range from the rebellious to the nonsensical, touching on a spectrum of topics – from preservation of Indigenous Latin American cultures to environmental crises and the human condition.From Griffin to Axolotl promotes an understudied genre of Hispanic literature, demonstrating that the bestiary is not extinct, but has been remoulded for modern society.

Whether unicorns, phoenix, and chimera, or axolotl, jaguars, and giant snakes, animals have often had the human experience grafted onto them, in a conscious or unconscious reflection of a society's beliefs, ambitions, and inequalities.This volume seeks to explore different representations of real and imaginary animals across Hispanic literary production from the early modern era to the present day in order to gain a better understanding of how they serve as projections of human identities, knowledge, values, and vices. How do beasts enable the colonizing gaze and its reaches? How might beasts offer a means of decolonizing the Hispanophone world? And how do beasts articulate social unrest and a desire to resist inequality, poverty, and other ills of the modern world that collectively reinforce the status quo?Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors, illustrators, and graphic artists have understood animals and beasts, and how they interacted with them, contributors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain shed light on the use of animals as symbols and emblems, as well as how they have been employed to construct others as monstrous and less human.