Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) was the embodiment of the Latin American poet, essayist, and literary theorist during the first half of the twentieth century. With an astonishing intellectual curiosity and capacity for work, he thought and wrote about every important topic and major intellectual current that defined his beleaguered times. This collection recovers Reyes’ legacy from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, with essays written exclusively for this book by scholars from Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, France, Mexico, and the United States. They analyze Reyes’ poetry and essays from contrasting theoretical approaches and innovative readings of his major poetic works; his philosophical correspondence with leading European and Mexican writers; modernism in the Anglo-American and Latin American essay tradition; and, among other topics of interest, the idea of America and cosmopolitanism in his essays. The volume includes a full-length introduction, an interview with Latin American poet and essayist Octavio Armand, and English translations of Armand’s poems. The study is of significant value to scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader interested in a seminal writer who shaped the writing of poetry and the essay in Latin American letters during the first half of the twentieth century.

This book blends biography, history, and literary criticism in its analysis of Pocho (1959), José Antonio Villarreal’s evocative and semi-autobiographical novel about Richard Rubio, a Mexican American youth raised in a pastoral community in central California where people self-identified according to race, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Richard is the son of an Indigenous Maya mother and a Mexican, fair-skin father who fought in the 1910 Mexican Revolution as a cavalryman, placing Richard outside the town’s imposed and regulated ethnic identities. In spite of his varied ancestry, his American birth, and his probing intelligence, Richard’s Indigenous appearance casts him as a social outsider. Pocho was written over a nine-year period of vigorous creativity, and with Villarreal’s power of recall and imagination at their prime. In writing his inaugural novel, Villarreal drew inspiration from modern narratives (paintings, novels, films), and from ancient Greek tragedy to create a Mexican American version of its classical drama ancestor. This book’s critical approach to Villarreal’s literary work is intelligibly written so as to be of access to a broad and all-inclusive readership and institutions, from college and university professors, public libraries, and the general reader to students of US, Mexican American, and world literatures.

This companion to the Classical Quarterly contains reviews of new work dealing with the literatures and civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Over 300 books are reviewed each year.