Andrew A. Anderson - Böcker

Throughout the 1920s, a remarkable number of young writers and artists lived and worked in Madrid, creating an atmosphere of effervescence and an upsurge in creativity that has rarely been equalled. These young people, acquainting themselves with one another within the span of only a few years, came together to form a tightly woven network of both personal and artistic relationships.In Configurations of a Cultural Scene Andrew Anderson explores this growing community of artists and writers with a focus on how sites of face-to-face interaction in Madrid fostered creative work and forged young identities. Organizing locations into places of sociability, learning, and residence, Anderson offers five case studies that exemplify the significance of these three points of intersection: Rafael Barradas and his tertulia at the Café de Oriente; an artists’ studio located on the Pasaje de la Alhambra; women art students at the Academia de San Fernando who lodged at the Residencia de Señoritas; the artist and writer Gabriel García Maroto; and the close relationship between artist Maruja Mallo and poet Rafael Alberti. Departing from conventional approaches that foreground the trajectories of individual careers, Anderson privileges the lived experience of artists and writers in his analysis of a rich cultural scene held together by cooperation, exchange, and interpersonal connections.

Critical and historical discussions of the life and work of Federico García Lorca, Spain's foremost poet and playwright of the twentieth century, often obscure the author's more avant-garde dramatic works. In Lorca's Experimental Theater, Andrew A. Anderson focuses on four of Lorca's most challenging plays Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, El público, Así que pasen cinco años, and El sueño de la vida (previously known as Comedia sin título) and on the surrounding context in which they came to be written and in only one case performed during his lifetime. While none of Lorca's plays can be considered conventional, these four works stand out in his corpus for challenging theatrical conventions most forcefully, both thematically and technically.With discussions of stagecraft, artistic modernism, and the historical avant-garde, Lorca's Experimental Theater provides detailed interpretive readings of the four plays, surveys their textual and performative history, and examines the most important contemporary influences on Lorca's creation of these expressive, innovative works.