Abstract

In 1933, Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave an address entitled "Play and Theory of the Duende" in which he claims duende as a distinctly Spanish brand of artistic inspiration and performative signature, bound up with the seemingly antithetical qualities of joy and suffering that dominate Spanish culture. In this essay, I use Lorca's concept of duende as a tool for analyzing The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, suggesting that such a comparison provides a new way of situating Hemingway's work within Spanish and modernist milieux.

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