Iberian and Latin American Studies: the Arts, Literature, and Identity – serie

«Figures of Exile is an excellent volume of essays carefully curated by Daniela Omlor and Eduardo Tasis that pays a long overdue homage to the late Nigel Dennis, one of the most important Hispanists of his generation. It does so brilliantly by bringing together a group of talented international scholars – the majority of whom can be considered as Professor Dennis’s disciples – who each offer original and illuminating perspectives on a variety of topics and authors related to the Spanish Republican exile, a field for which Nigel Dennis was an inescapable point of reference.» (Javier Letrán, University of St Andrews)　Figures of Exile contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the field of exile studies and aims to refamiliarise a wider readership with the Spanish exile of 1939. It provides new perspectives on the work of canonical figures of this exile, such as Rafael Alberti, Luís Cernuda, José Bergamín, Pedro Salinas, Francisco Ayala, Emilio Prados, Federico García Lorca or María Zambrano, and brings to the fore the work of less-studied figures like José Díaz Fernández, Juan David García Baca, Ernesto Guerra da Cal, Nuria Parés, María Luisa Elío, María Teresa León and Tomás Segovia. Rather than being disparate, this broad scope, which ranges from first generation to second generation exiles, from Galicia to Andalusia, from philosophers to poets, is testament to the wide-ranging impact of the Spanish Republican exile.

«In this remarkable study, Katrina Heil brilliantly highlights how Buero’s plays serve as a medium for the Spanish audience to process traumatic memory and come to terms with the past. The book successfully offers a fresh perspective on Buero’s theater, acknowledging his pivotal role as a precursor of historical memory activism during Franco’s dictatorship, while also shedding light on his enduring influence on contemporary dramatists of the twenty-first century.»(Yenisei Montes de Oca, Associate Professor of Spanish, James Madison University)This book explores Antonio Buero Vallejo’s use of the theater for historical memory activism and the role this function had in his formation as a tragedian. Buero’s early tragedies counter the assumption that Spaniards have only recently taken up the issue of recuperating historical memory in order to process the collective trauma of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. Buero’s theory of tragedy, which combines an Unamunian existentialist conception of the tragic with an Aristotelian understanding of tragic catharsis, demands personal and historical authenticity while simultaneously allowing for the healing of trauma. While Buero’s influence is rarely acknowledged in this regard, the legacy of Buerian tragedy as an ideal form of memoria histórica activism is seen in contemporary Civil War tragedies, which are appearing with increased frequency on the Spanish stage alongside the growth of the historical memory movement in Spanish culture and politics.

This book offers a significant, original and timely contribution to the study of one of the most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas. The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas’ writing, the autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition.Through focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile, the author analyses the ways in which Arenas’ writing emblemises a complex process of identification with, and rejection of, his homeland – always an imagined place and which is, as the place of his origins, intrinsically related to the maternal. She examines how the maternal and the motherland are conflated and how the narrator-protagonists’ identification is always in relation to, and dependent upon, this dominant motif. The book also explores the extent to which Arenas’ writing is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland, and shows that Arenas suffered the exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus.

This book brings together twelve specially commissioned essays that showcase current research on Spanish Republican exile theatre and performance, including work by some of the foremost scholars in the field. Covering a range of periods, geographical locations and theatrical phenomena, the essays are united by the common question of what it means to ‘stage exile’, exploring the relationship between space, identity and performance in order to excavate the place of theatre in Spanish Republican exile production.Each chapter takes a particular case study as a starting point in order to assess the place of a particular text, practitioner or performance within Hispanic theatre tradition and then goes on to examine the case study’s relationship with the specific sociocultural context in which it was located and/or produced. The authors investigate wider issues concerning the recovery and performability of these documentary traces, addressing their position within the contemporary debate over historical and cultural memory, their relationship to the contemporary stage, the insights they offer into the experience and performance of exile, and their contribution to contemporary configurations of identity and community in the Hispanic world. Through this commitment to interdisciplinary debate, the volume offers a new and invigorating reimagination of twentieth-century Hispanic theatre from the margins.

The official centenary commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 provided scholars with an opportunity to consider memorialization and its legacies and ‘afterimages’ in the twentieth century through to the present time. This collection of new essays, commissioned from experts based in Mexico, Europe and the United States, plays on the interrelated notions of ‘revisitation’, haunting, residual traces and valediction to interrogate the Revolution’s multiple appearances, reckonings and reconfigurations in art, photography, film, narrative fiction, periodicals, travel-testimonies and poetry, examining key constituencies of creative media in Mexico that have been involved in historicizing, contesting or evading the mixed legacies of the Revolution. The interplay of themes, practices and contexts across the chapters (ranging from the 1920s through to the present day) draws on interdisciplinary thinking as well as new findings, framing the volume’s discourse with a deliberately multi-dimensional approach to an often homogenized topic. The contributors’ scholarly referencing of artists, novelists, poets, photographers, foreign correspondents, critics, filmmakers and curators is detailed and wide-ranging, creating new juxtapositions that include some rarely studied material.

Jorge Semprún is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities. Although Semprún’s work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprún’s work goes beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view of his œuvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory in some of Semprún’s works, drawing on current debates in the field of memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts, such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity, to be examined and discussed.

Women have often chosen to tell their secrets, confide their dreams and express their deepest and most intimate thoughts in diaries, letters and other forms of life-writing. Although it is well established as a genre in the Anglophone and Francophone traditions, there has been very little publication of life-writing in the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds and even less scholarly criticism has appeared.This collection of essays is the first volume to focus on the variety of women’s life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic world. The authors analyse women who have written or expressed their sense of identity through diaries, autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, travel writing and poetry, as well as forms of visual art, examining how they represent themselves and others. The volume brings together critics and academics working in Europe and the Americas who are engaging with the work of women from different countries, produced in locations ranging from a sixteenth-century convent to a twenty-first-century kitchen. The book responds to a range of different literary genres as well as reaching beyond literature to analyse women’s self-representation through painting, drawing and collage.

Writing Travel investigates the ways in which two major Latin American authors, Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, engage with travel and space in their literary work. Travel and space are structures of representation within which cultural traditions are interrogated, reassessed and reformulated and therefore fundamental to the understanding of the critical fabric of the texts themselves. The book enquires into the politics of representation in Bolaño’s and Saer’s work and the cultural and ideological implications at stake in «writing travel». Writing Travel comprises the first scholarly study of the work of Roberto Bolaño and Juan José Saer, with a focus on the thematic and formal representation of travel and space in their literature. It is an important contribution to the existing knowledge on the novels of the two authors, examining key and understudied aspects of their work.

Coincidiendo con el ochenta aniversario del comienzo de la Guerra Civil Espanola, la publicacion La memoria transgeneracional se plantea observar la transmision transgeneracional, en Espana, de la memoria del conflicto de 1936-1939, a traves de la mirada proporcionada por la literatura de tercera generacion. Su primera seccion se centra alrededor de un acercamiento interdisciplinar a la "memoria" como objeto de estudio, y de la contextualizacion de la memoria traumatizada en Espana a partir del ano 1939. Por medio de la observacion de un corpus de novelas recien publicadas (entre las cuales se ha dedicado un analisis especifico a La voz dormida de Dulce Chacon, El corazon helado de Almudena Grandes, !Otra maldita novela sobre la guerra civil! de Isaac Rosa, y Ayer no mas de Andres Trapiello), el objetivo principal de la investigacion es la formulacion de pautas interpretativas que ayuden a parcelar la rapida evolucion del panorama literario de la Espana actual en lo que se refiere a la representacion del pasado conflictivo de la nacion.