Currents in Comparative Romance Languages & Literatures – serie

Because advances made by science and technology far outstripped improvements in human nature, utopian dreams of perfect societies in the twentieth century quickly metamorphosed into dystopian nightmares, which undermined individual identity and threatened the integrity of the family. Armed with technological and scientific tools, totalizing social systems found in literature abolish the distinction between public and private life and thus penetrate and corrupt the very core of all utopian blueprints and visions: the education of future generations. At the heart of the family, mothers as parents transmit their diverse cultural traditions while socializing their children and thus compete with ideologically driven systems that usurp their role as educators. Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature focuses, therefore, on the thematic importance of this and other maternal roles for generic metamorphosis: the shift to dystopia invariably is signaled by the inversion of traditional maternal roles. The longevity of the utopian-dystopian literary tradition and persistence of the maternal model of human relationships serve as points of reference in this post-modern age of relative cultural values. Meta-utopian exploration of this thematic tension between utopia and dystopia reminds us that «no place» may not be home, but we need to keep going there.

Sandian heroines swirl around men in their sororal and sartorial disguises like moths around candle flames. However, as Disguise in George Sand’s Novels illustrates, the disguise is not an instrument to seduce men but rather to assert the heroines’ true selves. The portrayal of female and androgynous protagonists in Rose et Blanche (1831), Indiana (1832), Lélia (1833/39), Gabriel (1839), Consuelo (1842), and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) is a metaphor to demonstrate the continuity of identities before and after the disguise as George Sand stipulates in her theory of the ménechme. Disguise in George Sand’s Novels explores the maturation process of Romantic and artistically inclined heroines and highlights the spiritual meaning of the disguise as a rite of passage for the birth of a new type of protagonist: spiritual, self-assertive, and dedicated to erasing gender inequality and helping the poor.

Even after the turbulent events that culminated in the Revolution of 1848, French women remained disenfranchised and disillusioned due to their exclusion from the public domain. However, a group of pioneering women persistently challenged the issue of civil rights and the legal minority of women in many genres: beginning with feminist journals then satirical poetry, fiction, pamphlets, posters, treatises, inspirational slogans, letters, and even travelogues. This book gives an overview of the corpus of writings by women at this historic moment and examines the political culture into which these writings were produced. Joyce Dixon-Fyle argues that the genres selected by women writers such as Eugénie Niboyet, Jeanne Deroin, Jenny d’Héricourt, Juliette Adam, Maria Deraimes were simply modes of expression determined less by choice than by the repressive politics and censorship of the July Monarchy, which was relentless in its attempts to silence and marginalize women.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a «boom» in the production, publication, readership, and scholarship of women’s writing from Latin America. In fact, the emergence of women writers is perhaps the most significant phenomenon of the «post-boom» period of Latin American literary history, a phenomenon that has been influenced in turn by the burgeoning development of a number of women’s movements on the continent. Within this «boom», the short story has become an increasingly popular genre amongst women writers. This book considers the location(s) of four major women writers – Cristina Peri Rossi, Rosario Ferré, Albalucía Angel, and Isabel Allende – and their short fiction within these changing literary and social contexts. Combining close textual analysis of their fiction with a consideration of the social, historical, and geographical contexts of literary production, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in Latin American studies, women’s studies, and comparative literature.

Staging Subversions: The Performance-within-a-Play in French Classical Theater defines a new type of metadrama using Le Tartuffe as its paradigm and explores the complex, ambiguous, and enlightening relationships that metadrama maintains with the social and political orders. While metadramatic scenes are most often concerned with theater itself, the performance-within-a-play adopts an important function in the play’s plot, and, consequently, in the social world of the play. The performance-within-a-play is particularly associated by the classical playwrights with the family structure, with the class system, with women’s social roles, and with the politics of absolutism.

A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin’s critical reception, however, has the poet saying the exact opposite. Joseph Suglia counters the dominant critical reception of Hölderlin’s Empedokles fragments, which would transform the tragic hero’s experience of mortality into a project that would be accomplished in the name of the transcendent reconciliation of disparate spheres. This book also focuses on a densely detailed consideration of the work of the great French critic and literary artist, Maurice Blanchot, whose own treatment of self-sacrifice exists in closer proximity to Hölderlin’s than the former appears to recognize. For Blanchot, it is argued, self-sacrifice is «a sacrifice that is an engagement with, in, and for language, a sacrifice that is both madness and mystery».

The Naturalists wrote from a «scientific» point of view, and no science had more currency in society in the late nineteenth century than Darwin’s theory of evolution. Until now, this motif in Guy de Maupassant has escaped critical attention. Maupassant’s Fiction and the Darwinian View of Life examines evolutionary theory in the literature in a way accessible to students of literature and science alike. It first explains the theoretical basis and Maupassant’s affinity for it, then studies one short story, «La Ficelle», in its entirety, proposing a new and interesting interpretation based on evidence read through a Darwinian lens.The remaining chapters organize a lively Darwinian reading of Maupassant according to topics such as natural selection, heredity, and materialism. The book shows that Darwinism and the economic variety of Social Darwinism figure significantly in Maupassant’s fiction. It is a must for students and teachers of Naturalism and Darwinism across the liberal arts.

Luis Goytisolo’s novel, 360º Diary, constitutes a reflection on the act of creativity. The novel is in the form of a diary that begins on the author’s birthday and concludes one (lunar) year later. Each day of the week is identified with a theme such as the seasons; the broad movements of history; the biological and psychological cycles of all living beings; and time itself. The author of the diary contemplates and acts upon all the various kinds of knowledge that have come together in his person, either through study, experience, or intuition. Just as in his most well-known novel, Antagonía, Goytisolo uses 360º Diary to explore the human condition and the diverse ways in which the individual comes to know and understand, in whatever limited way, the possibilities of human existence. The totality is a comprehensive, 360º view of contemporary life by an artist employing everything he has learned so as to communicate with the reader willing to follow him in his reflections and, ideally, use them as a starting point for his/her own ideas.

The nineteenth century saw a fundamental change in the practice and psychology of shopping with the appearance of the department store: La Samaritaine in Paris (1869), Macy’s in New York (1858) and Harrods in London (1849) were early representations of Western consumer culture. The Sentiment of Spending examines this shift first on a socio-historic level and then through the literary lens of some of the century’s most vital authors, the exponents of Naturalism – Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Jori-Karl Huysmans – as well as the fascinating, if rarely studied, Rachilde. In the works discussed, the characters reveal through their interpersonal, sexual, and sentimental relationships the penetrating effects of a consumerist culture. As both a literary and social analysis, this book also addresses the moral question inherent in a world where shopping and sentiment are so inextricably intertwined. The Sentiment of Spending provides profound insights into some essential texts, and is an engaging read for anyone with an interest in French literature and its reflection of our society.

This book examines how eight eighteenth-century French theorists – Maillet, Montesquieu, La Mettrie, Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire – addressed evolutionism. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually open the door to the mutability of species and a departure from the long-held belief that the chain of beings is fixed. This book describes how the philosophes established a triune relationship among contemporary scientific discoveries, random creationism propelled by the motive and conscious properties of matter, and the notion of the chain of being, along with its corollaries, plenitude and continuity. Also addressed is the contemporary debate over whether apes could ever be taught to speak as well as the issue of race and the family of man.

Por primera vez en la historia de los estudios sobre Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, El color del romanticismo presenta un nuevo punto de vista basado en un doble analisis comparativo: por un lado, entre el romanticismo aleman, en la persona de Novalis, y el espanol, en la persona de Becquer; y por otro lado, entre literatura y pintura, pues ambos escritores usan el color, especialmente el azul, como instrumento pictorico que les sirve a ambos para solucionar la insuficiencia lingueistica de la que parece adolecer la literatura romantica europea. A la zaga de los teoricos del color decimononicos, principalmente Goethe y su libro Zur Farbenlehre (Hacia una teoria de los colores), de 1810, el estudio semantico del uso del color azul en ambos poetas permite una clasificacion entre usos oniricos y no oniricos de dicho color, que situa a Becquer en un mas apropiado lugar en el panorama de los romanticos europeos.

Writing Tangier discusses an array of topics relating to the literature on Tangier from the seventeenth century to the present. Major questions include: Why has Tangier come to play an important role in contemporary world literary history as a signifier in the literary imagination; what is the nature of the inter-textual output produced through Paul Bowles’ translations of the oral tales of a circle of uneducated storytellers (including Mohammed Mrabet and Larbi Layachi) and the text (For Bread Alone) brought to Bowles by the literate Mohamed Choukri; how do academics, artists, and writers who have been based in the city or who have written about it assess the various socio-economic, political, and cultural factors that have shaped its cultural production and the relationship of this production to the celebrated hybrid aspects of its identity; does the success of the literature of Tangier reflect a truly new multicultural cosmopolitanism, or does it stem from the fact that this literature is congenial to Westerners, that it is understood in terms that they themselves define, and that much of it (including productions in Arabic prepared with the expectation of translation) has even been «written to measure» for them?

Pedro Salinas (1892-1951), one of the greatest modern poets of any country, is unquestionably the preeminent love poet of twentieth-century Spain. Memory in My Hands includes an ample selection of his three books of love poetry – The Voice I Owe to You [La voz a ti debida], A Reason for Love [Razón de amor], and Long Lament [Largo lamento] in English translation alongside the Spanish original. This trilogy of love poems, the last (posthumous) of which has never been translated before, are of a nature to win a large and devoted audience: they are at once passionate, eloquent, and whimsical. The introduction to Memory in My Hands sets the poems in context, providing the story of the love affair that inspired the poems. It also raises the question of the nature of autobiographical poetry and considers this collection in the tradition of poetic sequences such as Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.

Ideal for students of modern Latin American literature, Journeys of Formation: The Spanish American ‘Bildungsroman’ offers a lucid introduction to the Bildungsroman as a genre before revealing how the journey motif works as both a plot-forming device and as a means of characterization in several of the most canonical Spanish American Bildungsromane. In the process, the author demonstrates the overlooked importance of the travel motif in this genre. Although present in the vast majority of Bildungsromane, if the journey is discussed at all by critics it tends to be in superficial terms. The author contends that no discussion of the Spanish American novel of formation would be complete without an exploration of travel. Yolanda A. Doub articulates the role of travel as a catalyst in the formation process of young male and female protagonists by examining in detail six representative novels from three different countries and time periods – from Argentina: Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra (1926) and Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926); from Peru: José María Arguedas’s Los ríos profundos (1958) and Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s Crónica de San Gabriel (1960); and from Mexico: Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán (1957) and Elena Poniatowska’s La «Flor de Lis» (1988).

Is the affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony unbreakable? When intellectuals attempt to retell history from its bottom side, or when writers try to represent the so-called marginalized subject, are they not simply reinforcing the perspective and agenda of society’s hegemonic currents? Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation engages in a discussion of the problem of this potentially unbreakable affiliation between intellectuals and hegemony. Through five twentieth-century Mexican literary works: Pedro Páramo (1955, Juan Rulfo); Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969, Elena Poniatowska); three short stories from Ciudad Real (1960, Rosario Castellanos); Llanto: Novelas imposibles (1992, Carmen Boullosa); and Muertos incómodos (falta lo que falta) (2005, Subcomandate Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II), this book attempts to examine the contradictory phenomenon that emerges when intellectuals’ desire to represent a marginalized subject or history clashes with their own limited ability to fully know the marginalized. No critics have compiled these five seemingly unrelated Mexican texts in order to scrutinize such a contradictory tendency. Cooptation, Complicity, and Representation provides an innovative way to connect the five texts by delineating, within specific Mexican historical and geopolitical contexts, how and why intellectuals have difficulty moving away from the reproduction of «otherness», when they attempt to represent a marginalized subject or history. This book can be useful for those who are interested in the Spanish American boom literature, twentieth-century Mexican literature, women writing, testimonial writing, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, historical novels, and cultural studies.

Freedom in French Enlightenment Thought examines how five eighteenth-century French theorists – Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Condorcet – kindled the flame of freedom in America and France. Each thinker laid down a building block that would eventually inspire the language in constitutions around the world. They held that citizens have certain inalienable rights that are dictated by natural law and endowed to all by our Creator; that these rights include equality before the law, justice, safety and security of persons and property, and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion. Montesquieu recommended three separate branches of government that function independently of each other. Diderot held that there is no true sovereign, except the nation; that there is no true legislator, except the people. Rousseau advised that the individual will must be subordinate to the general will and private interest to that of the community: he warned against legislators who act from their own financial interests and enact laws to aggrandize themselves. Voltaire believed that selfishness, greed, and the desire for luxury are not only part of human nature, but that they compel people to achieve, trade with others, search, explore, and invent: the passions are the engine that makes capitalism run and that stimulate all human endeavor. Condorcet, a champion of civil rights, boldly proclaimed equality for women, blacks, and the poor. The philosophes held that free and universal public education will permit more citizens to participate in the progress of the arts and sciences and will improve the standard of living among all strata of society. An unrestrained press permits citizens to make informed decisions. Their polemics have indeed changed the face of the world.

Beautiful War explores the interdependent political, linguistic, and erotic registers of lesbian feminism in Monique Wittig’s novels, querying in particular how they function collectively to destabilize male hegemony and heterosexism. Beginning with the assertion that Wittig expressly dismantles the Classical veneration of la belle femme in order to create an agent more capable of social change (la femme belliqueuse), the author traces the permutations of violence through her four novels, L’Opoponax, Les Guérillères, Le Corps Lesbien, and Virgile, Non and examines the relevance of brutality to Wittig’s feminist agenda. Drawing on literary criticism, intellectual and political history, queer theory, and feminist theory in his readings of the primary texts, the author argues that Wittig’s œuvre constitutes a progressive textual actualization of paradigm shifts toward gender parity and a permanent banishment of the primacy of male and heterosexist political and sexual discourse.

Crossing Cultures/Cruzando culturas focuses on the creation of literary works and how these works reflect the life experiences of the authors. The purpose of this book is to inspire young Mexican-American, Hispanic, and Latino people by demonstrating that education is the key to life through the example of authors who have become successful in spite of their modest beginnings. Their love for education and their drive to improve themselves has turned them into nationally and internationally known authors recognized by major publishing companies. Their books in English have been translated quickly into other languages. The interviews reveal not only the authors’ origins but also how they were able to overcome difficulties and challenges in their lives. The interviewed novelists include Mario Bencastro, Aristeo Brito, Rolando J. Díaz, Graciela Limón, and Demetria Martínez. Interviews conducted in English with Mexican-American writers are included in their original English version along with a proper Spanish translation. This book comprises a valuable resource for university students who are pursuing a degree in Spanish, Chicano studies, and ethnic studies that facilitates understanding the various dynamics of the Hispanic experience through literature.Crossing Cultures/Cruzando culturas se enfoca en la creación de obras literarias y como estas obras reflejan las experiencias de los autores. El propósito de este libro es inspirar a los jóvenes México-Americanos, Hispanos y Latinos al demostrar que la educación es la llave que les abre las puertas del triunfo en la vida. El ejemplo de los autores que han sido exitosos a pesar de sus raíces humildes les estimulará a salir adelante. El amor por la educación de estos escritores y su motivación para mejorarse los ha convertido en autores reconocidos nacionalmente e internacionalmente por las editoriales más reconocidas del mundo entero. Sus libros en inglés han sido traducidos a otras lenguas rápidamente. Las entrevistas revelan no solamente los orígenes de los escritores pero como lograron vencer las dificultades y desafíos en su vida. Los novelistas entrevistados incluyen a Mario Bencastro, Aristeo Brito, Rolando J. Díaz, Graciela Limón y Demetria Martínez. Las entrevistas realizadas en inglés con los escritores México-Americanos están incluidas en su forma original en inglés acompañadas por una traducción al español. Este libro comprende un recurso valioso para los investigadores universitarios que buscan especializarse en literatura o historia latina, chicana, o estudios étnicos que facilitan el entendimiento de las dinámicas variadas de la experiencia hispana a través de la literatura.

What makes a world author? How did Homer become a «cosmopolitan» author? How does a Mayan creation narrative challenge our Western logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might world literature look like to a fourth-century Roman reader? How do past and more recent translations of Dante’s Commedia help us to rethink the changing definitions of world literature? How did the Alexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso’s epic adapt to a later cultural context dominated by the «Turkish Fear»? What shaped the West’s first impression of The Tale of Genji? How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the Caribbean? What are the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe’s weltliteratur paradigm? What happens when cultures import canonical texts for lack of their own? By what process does an eccentric writer reconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of other cultures? How did literary criticism contribute to the canonization of the Thousand and One Nights in Western literature? What is left of the primacy of the national language when writers are published simultaneously in various translations? How do modern misreadings shape our understanding of national epics and ensure their survival?World literature, first intuited in Goethe’s foundational idea of weltliteratur as literature that seeks to transcend national boundaries, is viewed here in its essential mobility and migratory capacity, which relies on the centrality of the reading act. This volume focuses on foundational texts as they are read across cultures, languages and historical contexts. Its goal is to reflect on canonical texts – from Homer’s Odyssey to Murakami’s Genji, from Cervantes to Mayan hieroglyphs, from Dante to Coetzee, from Goethe to Lezama Lima, from the Thousand and One Nights to Jorge Luis Borges – in a global perspective: how they are translated, appropriated, transformed, how they travel across different cultures and languages, their foundational status evolving accordingly in a post-European world.Foundational Texts of World Literature includes contributions by Gerardo Aldana, Sandra Bermann, Piero Boitani, Michael Emmerich, Azadeh Yamini Hamedani, Stefan Helgesson, Paulo Lemos Horta, Juan Pablo Lupi, Peter Madsen, Ulrich Marzolph, Suzanne Saïd, Evanghelia Stead, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, and Richard Van Leeuwen.

Valéry’s Graveyard is in two parts. The first part presents the French text of Paul Valéry’s poem Le Cimetière marin (The Graveyard by the Sea) and a facing English translation, followed by a descriptive account of the poem that sets out its main structural and dynamic features and traces its narrative. The second part consists of nine short chapters on selected themes of the poem in their relation to the poet’s thought, including certain of his scientific concerns, and to literature ancient and modern.Le Cimetière marin is one of the most celebrated works of poetry of the last hundred years, widely recognized as distinguished for beauty of form and wealth of meaning. On the basis of the French text and a translation that is at once accurate and poetical, this book provides an introduction to the poem, and thereby to the complex intellectual world of Valéry. It exhibits the depth and breadth both of the poem and of the poet’s thought.A valuable resource for scholars, Valéry’s Graveyard is accessible to all serious readers. As it does not require a knowledge of French, the book is suitable for study in any course on modern literature.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the French philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. This volume contains the first English translations of his plays, The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family. These complex and very entertaining plays delve into the attitudes of the middle-class, bourgeois society and reveal an eighteenth-century «suburbia» that populates dramatic and suspenseful situations and settings. The translations are vivid and contemporary and bring the plays alive to early twenty-first-century stage and culture.

In Exile and Identity in Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Spanish Women, Karla P. Zepeda studies the experience of exile and its effects on identity in three autobiographies: In Place of Splendor by Constancia de la Mora, Memoria de la melancolía by María Teresa León, and Seis años de mi vida by Federica Montseny. These three prominent Spanish women of the Second Republic became exiles at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War due to the onset of the Francisco Franco regime. The political expatriation caused their relocation into various countries: the United States, France, Argentina, and Italy. The repositioning initiated a process of self-reinvention, as the women come in contact with social circumstances prompting new versions of self. Through their works, these women negotiate their identity in relation to the lost homeland and the new locale. Exile and Identity in Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Spanish Women examines the diverse character of diaspora, the social transactions deployed in a variety of circumstances, and the self-negotiations elicited in social interactions. Identity proves to be an intentional re-creation of self, enacted in particular circumstances, and negotiated as a response to social conditions.

Largely forgotten during the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth century, Constance de Salm (Constance-Marie de Théis, Mme Pipelet de Leury, later Princess de Salm-Reifferscheid-Dyck,) finally attracted the attention of such scholars as Elizabeth Colwill, Geneviève Fraisse, Huguette Krief, and Christine Planté in the early twenty-first century. However, there has to date been no comprehensive study of her published works, her vast correspondence, and the importance of her cultural exchanges. In this book, Ellen McNiven Hine contributes to the recent upsurge of interest in the literature of this particularly turbulent period in French history. This book considers not only her literary aspirations and claim to fame but also such topics as her contribution to the scientific culture of the period, the extent of the political involvement of a «non-activist» woman, her challenge to what she saw as inequitable provisions in the Civil Code, her championing of women’s progress in literature and the arts, and the role that networking and patronage played in her personal and professional life. Moreover, the study highlights the similarities and differences between her life, writing, and influence and those of other postrevolutionary women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, Margaret Somerville, and Louise Colet.Constance de Salm uses a variety of genres to address issues of particular importance to women, such as equal access to educational opportunities, the cost to women’s health of reproduction, and lack of economic resources for single and widowed women. She displays a surprising modernity in her awareness of the difficulty of resolving relationship, career, and motherhood problems that continue to plague women in the twenty-first century and points to a future in which women will have access to educational and employment opportunities.

Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora presents a variety of perspectives on the Portuguese diaspora, from literature to identity discourse to biography and autobiography. The book is divided into three parts: reading literary identities within and without borders; constructing/constructed extra-literary identities at home and abroad; and literary ethnic voices from the North American diaspora and beyond. The 22 texts presented in this volume highlight the diasporic themes and backgrounds upon which the scope of the scholarly texts – as well as the personal contributions of short stories, poetry, interviews, and autobiographical memory – can be interwoven in a narrative identity construction.

This book enhances our understanding of France and the United States by focusing on their intercultural relations. Baudelaire and Emerson have at the core of their thinking the very notion of how to reconcile individual and collective experience, a theme that is pervasive in French-American relations. A historical perspective to contemporary issues regarding the French-American connection helps us to come to terms with some of the pressing problems currently facing France and the United States and to view some key literary texts in a new light.

Search for Self in Other in Cicero, Ovid, Rousseau, Diderot and Sartre examines how these five theorists recognized that searching for self in an idealized other can lead to a variety of perversions. Cicero warned against seeking friends whom we regard as being everything that we are not: he advised to first be a good person and then to seek other. Ovid showed that Narcissus, who had no close friends to reinforce his identity, was oblivious to his own assets and tried to live vicariously through other. Rousseau explained why modern man, while seated in a theater, feels compassion and is transported by pity, anxiety and fear for the welfare of fictional characters as if it were his own. Diderot showed how the absence of self can be exploited by the powerful to reshape the minds of the weak. He proves that given the right environment and length of time, any one of us, like the victims in The Nun, could just as easily have his life ruined. Sartre reminds us that it is impossible to be-in-exterior. We see ourselves according to the way that others perceive us based on conditioning and prejudices. Sartre untangles the snarled web of misperception of self that arises from «the look» of the other.This book addresses man’s growing understanding of the death of self in the mirror of other across the corridors of time – from Narcissus’ ancient pool, to Cicero’s Roman forum, to Rousseau’s Parisian theater, to Diderot’s convent in The Nun, to Sartre’s twentieth-century hell.

We Had Won the War (Habíamos ganado la Guerra) is the bestselling 2008 memoir about life in post-Civil War Barcelona by the acclaimed Spanish author Esther Tusquets. Unlike the majority of Spanish postwar narratives that are written from the perspective of those who lost the Civil War and suffered under the Franco regime, Tusquets’ account recreates the era from the standpoint of the «winners.» As the offspring of an upper-middle-class Catalonian family who had sided with Franco in the armed conflict, the young Esther grew up as a privileged member of Spanish society, enjoying all the advantages that birth and material affluence could afford. The child’s initial enchantment with the glittering, sheltered world of her kin soon turns to disillusionment, as she discerns the fault lines running through the larger social landscape, and senses the hypocrisy and cruelty of her parents’ inbred clan. She finds in the inner world of literature and of the imagination compensation for a disturbing outer reality. As the growing girl struggles to find her own way, she experiments with political and religious movements that aim to forge a more just society. Her quest eventually leads to the rejection of all absolutist forms of thought and action, and to the assumption of her life’s calling as a publisher and writer. The book paints a vivid picture of life during the early Franco years, while offering an intimate, revealing look at the childhood and adolescence of one of Spain’s most remarkable contemporary authors.