The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel's development. Yet, as Prez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated "a class war not between social classes but between literary classes." Concentrating on source material not widely available, Prez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of their publication, then develops a reading of them based on the intellectual context of this reception. A new preface and an appendix on vanguard biographies have been added to this paperback edition.

Las historias e invenciones de Félix Muriel, de Rafael Dieste, se publicaron en Buenos Aires en 1943 y, ya entonces, pudo causar cierta sorpresa el hecho de que su autor, exiliado republicano, no se refiriera en ellas a la reciente guerra de España ni a sus consecuencias. Sin embargo, de modo subrepticio, la política estructura el texto y contribuye a construir la problemática unidad del libro -un libro que muchos llamaron "obra maestra" y que José Ramón Marra-López ha situado "al margen de toda posible clasificación". No para clasificarlo, sino para entender esa "marginalidad" y los motivos de su encanto está escrito este estudio, el primero dedicado en extenso específicamente al volumen y el primero que contempla con detenimiento el manuscrito autógrafo.

This is the first book in English to examine the development of the avant-garde in Spain during the early twentieth century, across a wide range of cultural media.

Giraudoux was a well-known novelist for some twenty years before the appearance of his first drama. His novels were published in Europe, and North and South America, and until this book, no study has been made to trace the path of his influence as a novelist in the international arena.

The development of basic textual strategies in Spanish fiction from 1902 to 1926 is the focus of this study. Challenging traditional views of the relationships between the literature produced by the Generation of 1898 and the Spanish vanguard movement, Spires traces through analyses of select works a process of evolution beginning at the turn of the century and continuing into the 1920s. Spires demonstrates how the somewhat tentative strategies of the first decade became more daring in the second. As opposed to the extant historical, autobiographical, and thematic surveys of this period, Transparent Simulacra features structuralist and post-structuralist readings of fiction by Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Pérez de Ayala, Gómez de Serna, Jarnés, and Salinas. These approaches offer not only revisionist views of a literary period but also revisionist readings of some of Spain's best-known fiction.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as “How do you imagine Latin America?” and “What should American art be?” issued by avant-garde magazines like Imán, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba’s Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of “America,” particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like “American art,” as well as “modernism” and “avant-garde,” were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or “comparison of the arts,” through the rise of enquêtes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists’ and writers’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole’s original and compellingly crafted work.