Provides, in a single alphabetical sequence, a one-volume reference manual of information likely to be of value to readers of literature in the Spanish language.

This volume of essays in Spanish and English examines some of the key issues which surround the emergence of the Avant-Garde novel in Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century. The experimental novel of the 1920s is seen as the culmination of a process of change in approaches to the novel which began early in the century and was further promoted by Spain's key Avant-Gardist Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Several essays focus on the form of the novel and seek to shed new light on the role of José Ortega y Gasset as mentor to the new writers of the 1920s and on our understanding of his use of the term 'dehumanisation'. Other essays focus on individual works or individual writers (Benjamín Jarnés, Antonio Espina, Mario Verdaguer, César Arconada) to explore a range of topics including the links between experimental writing in Spain and in other countries, the metafictional novel, the demise of the hero, the novelist as a professional writer, and finally the decline of the Avant-Garde novel in Spain in the 1930s as writers abandoned experimental fiction, turned to writing more socially - or politically - committed works or contributed to the new vogue of novelised biographies.

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 Pérez 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, Pérez 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.