Editor’s Message: Revisiting Writers and their Fiction

Last December, Hispania featured its first State-of-the-State article on the linguistic topic of aspect or tense (see Hispania 96.4 [2013]: 624–39). Taking into account past research and publication on selected topics, the goal of the State-of-the-State feature is to advocate for an up-to-date and comprehensive perspective on the topic whether it is literary, linguistic, or pedagogical.

For this current issue, I invited Mark P. Del Mastro (see his bio below) to pen an introductory essay to his featured article, titled “Reflections of Oneself: Reconciling Identity in Carmen Laforet’s Al volver la esquina.” Dr. Del Mastro points out the urgency of reevaluating the contributions of Spanish novelist Carmen Laforet in particular. It is worth considering this issue raised by Del Mastro with an even broader lens; over the last decade we have lost contact with an important living generation of writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Laforet died in 2004, and, this year, we lost other seminal novelists, such as Gabriel García Márquez (see Hispania 97.3 (2014): 351–54) and, more recently, Ana María Matute (see “Announcements” at the beginning of this issue). As students and critics of literary and cultural production, these milestones alert us to the timeliness of redoubling our efforts to review and reframe the work of such novelists with whom many of us were grateful to have shared a cup of coffee.

Mark P. Del Mastro

Mark P. Del Mastro (PhD, University of Virginia) is Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies at the College of Charleston, and among his publications he has several articles on Carmen Laforet. He is also Executive Director of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society, and Founding Director of the South Carolina Spanish Teacher of the Year program.