The Subject in Question

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page, Dedication

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Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

Part of chapter 1 was earlier published as “Julius Petersen and the Construction of the Spanish Literary Generation” in Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2002), used by permission (http://www.tandf.co.uk). The translations, entirely my own, are intended to help non-readers of Spanish to follow the text. ...

Introduction

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pp. 1-18

This study presents an alternative to the standard organization of Spanish literary history of the early decades of the twentieth century by abandoning the nation-centered generational model that has long dominated critical orientation in Spain in favor of a framework associated with a more far-reaching, international literary movement specified by the period concept “modernism.” ...

1. The Spanish Literary Generation and Early Contemporary Literary History

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pp. 19-50

An examination of some of the consequences of adopting the literary generation model in Spain instead of a period approach to its early contemporary literature requires a brief acknowledgment of parallel and opposing phenomena elsewhere in Europe. Resistance to the idea of a European modernism remains in large part because of the competing interests of avant-garde groups. ...

2. Modernism and Spain: Aesthetics, Ideology, Tradition, Subjectivity

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pp. 51-84

The unwillingness of Spanish criticism to consider an expansive concept of modernism as a viable aesthetic standard for early contemporary literary history has had adverse consequences for literary appreciation as well as for the standing of Spanish authors and texts in relation to other European writing. ...

3. From the Labyrinth: The Spanish Modernist Novel and the “New Man”

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pp. 85-126

In the introduction to a recent edition of Estación. Ida y vuelta, in which the editor designates Rosa Chacel as the female writer most worthy of keeping intellectual and artistic company with the “Generation of 1927” (“la escritora del 27” [“the female writer of 27”]),¹ Chacel pays homage to the major talents of the early-twentieth-century Spanish novel, ...

4. Modernist Hieroglyphics: Geographies of Presence in the Poetry of Jorge Guillén and Vicente Aleixandre

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pp. 127-165

The “hieroglyphic mode” represents an intensification of the “aesthetic of interruption” fundamental to works identified as modernist. The much greater iconicity of the poetry of Jorge Guillén and Vicente Aleixandre—in comparison to the almost anti-pictorial settings of the previous chapter ...

5. Absence and Experience in the Poetry of Luis Cernuda and Rafael Alberti

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pp. 166-205

In sharp contrast to Guillén and Aleixandre’s “geographies of presence” that proclaim these poets’ aggressive capacities to affirm the fullness of being, the poetry of Luis Cernuda and Rafael Alberti recounts their distance and absence from an existential center, the consequence of life experiences ...

6. Subjective Fragmentation in the Theater of Federico García Lorca

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pp. 206-243

Although Federico García Lorca’s writing develops outlooks similar to Cernuda’s and Alberti’s in relation to the question of existence— that being expresses itself diffusely and in a pattern that the conscious will is incapable of substantially influencing—Lorca’s vision is ultimately more somber, and tragic. ...

Conclusion

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pp. 244-254

The conditions established for critical inquiry into one of the most productive periods of Spanish literary history are predicated on an extreme generational model that is very much a product of the radical positions that so adversely influenced European political and cultural life during the 1930s. ...

Works Cited

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pp. 255-262

Selected Bibliography

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pp. 263-266

Index

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pp. 267-281

Production Notes

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