This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernan Cortes.

In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving...

This study of Spanish American autobiography from its beginnings in the post-colonial nineteenth century to the present day concentrates mainly on cultural and historical issues. Spanish American autobiographies are fascinating hybrids, often wielding several discourses at once. They aspire to documentary status while unabashedly exalting the self, and dwell on personal experience while purporting to be exercises in historiography, the founding texts of a national archive. Professor Molloy examines a wide range of texts, from Sarmiento's Recuerdos de provincia to Victoria Ocampo's...

This book offers a theory about the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and about the emergence of the modern novel.

This study provides a fresh assessment of Spanish Romanticism through a sympathetic appraisal of its literary theory and criticism. It identifies the origins of Spanish Romantic thought in the theories of German Romantic thinkers, in particular Herder's historicism. The range of reference, from the articles of Bö hl von Faber to the judgments made by Cañ ete and Valera is counterpointed by the detail of close readings of books and articles published between 1834 and 1844, together with an examination of the ideas that informed the creative work of Ferná n Caballero. Derek...

The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Perez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban...

In Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative, Anibal Gonzalez explores the impact of journalism and journalistic rhetoric on the development of Spanish American narrative, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the testimonial and documentary novels of contemporary authors such as Miguel Barnet and Elena Poniatowska. Gonzalez examines selected works from the Spanish American narrative tradition that exemplify moments in the history of the relationship between literature and journalism. He argues that Spanish American narrative has sought to work in...

The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Perez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban...

The essays gathered here address the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar's oeuvre from a variety of critical positions and focus on several of his multifarious writings: poems, short stories, novels, and miscellanea. The intention has been to provide the space for a reappraisal of Cortazar that will question received notions and assumptions regarding his works, and hence pave the way for an overarching revision of his production and his place in Latin American letters. Although significantly different in their theoretical approach, style, and their point of insertion in Cortazar's oeuvre, the...

The Politics of Spanish American "Modernismo" elucidates the professional and literary means through which Spanish American modernistas negotiated a cultural politics of rapprochement with Spain and Europe in order to differentiate their Americanness from that of the United States. Gerard Aching argues that these turn-of-the-century men of letters were in fact responsible for the burgeoning role that intellectuals and writers had (and continue to have) in defining pan-Hispanicism. Aching's arguments contribute to current debates about modernity and the colonial/postcolonial condition in...

The Theatre of Garcia Lorca offers radical new readings of his major plays, drawing on cultural studies, women's and gay studies, psychoanalysis, and previously unexamined archival material. It also juxtaposes Lorca with major figures such as Gregorio Maranon, Langston Hughes, Andre Gide, and Lluis Pasqual, enabling us to see his theater in a new light. In addition, the book presents a new psychoanalytic reading of the plays, which returns to Freud's early clinical texts.