Enrique Pupo-Walker - Böcker

This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of "Castaways (Naufragios)", Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native people along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his compatriots. In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest in the cultures of the native people he encountered on his odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected.Cabeza de Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information, with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M. Lopez-Morillas' translation beautifully captures the sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's definitive critical edition, it promises to become the authoritative English translation.

This study of Spanish American autobiography from its beginnings in the post-colonial nineteenth century to the present day concentrates mainly on cultural and historical issues. Spanish American autobiographies are fascinating hybrids, often wielding several discourses at once. They aspire to documentary status while unabashedly exalting the self, and dwell on personal experience while purporting to be exercises in historiography, the founding texts of a national archive. Professor Molloy examines a wide range of texts, from Sarmiento's Recuerdos de provincia to Victoria Ocampo's Autobiografia. She analyses their textual strategies, the generic affiliations they claim, their relationship to the European canon and their dialogue with precursor texts, as well as their problematic use of memory and the ideological implications of their repressive tactics. This method enables her to identify perceptions of self and tensions between self and other, thus shedding light on the fluctuating place of the subject within a community.

This study provides a fresh assessment of Spanish Romanticism through a sympathetic appraisal of its literary theory and criticism. It identifies the origins of Spanish Romantic thought in the theories of German Romantic thinkers, in particular Herder's historicism. The range of reference, from the articles of Bohl von Faber to the judgements made by Canete and Valera is counterpointed by the detail of close readings of books and articles published between 1834 and 1844, together with an examination of the ideas which informed the creative work of Fernan Caballero. Derek Flitter's use of the history of ideas offers a corrective to the recent preponderance of political approaches to Spanish Romanticism, countering their stress on its radical and liberal associations with a detailed demonstration that the majority of Spanish Romantic writers derived their inspiration from restorative, traditionalist and Christian elements in their contemporaries' theory and criticism.

The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Pérez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban national identity through revisionary readings of both literary and non-literary works by Juan Marinello, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolds Guillén, Alejo Carpentier and others, dating from the early decades of the twentieth century, a time of intense self-reflection in the nation's history. Using a critical vocabulary derived from these works, he argues that Cuban identity is translational rather than foundational and that cubanía emerges from a nuanced, self-conscious recasting of foreign models.

Carlos Alonso's study provides a radical re-examination of the novela de la tierra or regional novel, which plays a central part in the development of Latin American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. He identifies the regional novel as a specific literary manifestation of the persistent meditation on cultural authochthony that has characterized Latin American cultural production from its beginnings, and which in his view springs from Latin America's problematic relationship with Modernity. He proposes a view of the autochthonous as a discourse rather than a referent. Professor Alonso presents his argument through challenging readings of three works that are universally acknowledged as archetypes of the autochthonous modality: Rivera's La voragine, Gallegos's Dona Barbara and Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra.

As Andrés Bello predicted in 1823, the glory of Simón Bolívar has continued to grow since the Spanish American Revolution. The Revolution is still viewed as an almost mythical quest, and the name of the Libertador has become synonymous with the region's hopes for integration. In this 1992 book, the official history of the Revolution - the heroic history of Bolívar - is replaced by the account of Bello, who was first Bolívar's teacher and later his critic. Through a detailed study of the manuscripts of Bello's unfinished poem América, Antonio Cussen reconstructs Bello's version of the Revolution and seeks to understand its political and cultural consequences. The author argues that Bello recorded the disintegration of the Augustan model of power and intimated the inevitable approach of liberalism with a certain longing for the classical culture of his youth.

Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora, one of seventeenth-century Mexico's best-known intellectuals, was a writer of fascinating and complex narratives that exemplify the heterogeneous nature of colonial Spanish American prose. This book, first published in 1993, was the first critical study to place both the writer and his narrative within the phenomenon of the barroco de Indias, or the Spanish American baroque. Approaching Sigüenza as criollo historian preoccupied with the placement of the New World within a universal context, Professor Ross develops a theoretical framework within which his texts can be read and understood in the modern era. Professor Ross incorporates into her examination of the author methods of critical analysis in the study of colonial Spanish American literature, such as the use of narrative theory, the historiography, and feminist criticism.

The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo, initially published in 1998, elucidates the professional and literary means by which Spanish American modernistas negotiated a cultural politics of rapprochement with Spain and Europe in order to differentiate their Americanness from that of the United States. Gerard Aching argues that these turn-of-the-century men of letters were in fact responsible for the burgeoning role that intellectuals and writers had (and continue to have) in defining pan-Hispanicism. Aching's arguments contribute to debates about modernity and the colonial/postcolonial condition in nineteenth-century Hispanic literatures. The interdisciplinary approach will appeal to scholars in literature, cultural studies, Latin American studies and history.

The Theatre of García Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It provides fascinating historical accounts of productions in different times and places, from New York in the 1930s to Madrid in the 1980s. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Marañón, Langston Hughes, André Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theatre in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud's early clinical texts. Examining the complex and productive intersection of history and fantasy that is characteristic both of García Lorca's theatre and of the cult to which it has given rise, this study offers a thorough reassessment of Lorca's work.