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The unedited correspondence between Gustavo Gili i Roig and Ángel Valbuena Prat allows us to discover important details about the genesis and the intricate editing process of the original and innovative Historia de la literatura española (1937). Because of some notes Valbuena wrote in his major work, he was involved after the Spanish Civil War in a police investigation that led him to publish a clandestine edition of his Historia de la literatura española. Thanks to the documents stored in the prosecution dossier, as well as other personal papers, we can now reconstruct these events involving one of the most brilliant and emblematic minds in Spanish literary historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labyrinth in Mexico is a Baroque symbol of identity: in this paper we propose a dialogue between three ‘labyrinth’ texts: a novel by Salvador Elizondo, a sculpture by Gabriel Orozco and a silkscreen print by Pedro Friedeberg. These three texts help us understand Mexican culture in its complexity and dynamism. The continuity of the Baroque canon in the Americas, and its rewritings, will be traced in terms of the so-calledNeobaroque.We begin with a definition of the labyrinth as a fold and bifurcation, linked to the principle of anamorphosis as a curious and disoriented perspective that emerges during the Renaissance. As Ariadne's thread we will use the Baroque Spanish poetics of Juan Caramuel and Juan Diaz Rengifo, along with the theoretical contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Jorge Luis Borges, to explore the folds and bifurcations of one narrative labyrinth, one graphic and one sculptural. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Borges’ relationship with Latin, and in particular with the work of Virgil was almost lifelong, and helps to explain Borges’ poetics. This paper will trace and explore this relationship, from the very early works such asFervor de Buenos AiresandLuna de enfrente, to his late work, in particularLos conjurados. Two key elements are essential in this analysis: a number of verses from Virgil’s first Eclogue, and the city of Geneva, a place of origins and endings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The holdings of the Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Granada, the Castilian Crown’s most important repository of legal documents in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, have been too little studied to date by historians of Spain. Drawing upon the slander trials whose documents are preserved in that archive, this article aims to establish their validity as sources for historical research. Although the trials have been examined from a variety of perspectives, their usefulness has scarcely been appreciated by those interested in the study of everyday life in sixteenth-century Spain. The personal squabbles to be found documented in the papers concerning these trials allow us to discover how individuals had recourse, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolic constructs (customs, norms and models of behaviour) created by the social groups to which they belonged, in order to differentiate themselves from others or to denigrate others in the eyes of their communities. Their recourse to these social norms and constructs reveals that the conduct of men and women at the time ranged and varied widely between the social norms they chose to obey and those they preferred to disregard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1580 Inés Álvarez de Gibraleón, widow of the ex-governor of the Philippines, Guido de Labezaris, was accused of witchcraft and sorcery in Manila together with her ‘daughter’ Ana de Monterrey. The origin of the accusation was an extraordinary event that happened while Doña Ana was carrying out her daily domestic chores. Two trials ensued. As there was no Inquisition personnel in the young colony at that stage, an ecclesiastical investigation was carried out into the potential heresy implied by the accusation. A record of this trial survives in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City. At the same time, the new governor, Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa, presided over a civil trial of Ana and her husband Captain Juan de Morón. The papers concerning this civil trial disappeared in suspicious circumstances. However, the records from Mexico when examined in combination with documents preserved in several Spanish archives reveal how alleged cases of witchcraft could be exploited by the powerful for their own ends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reproduces part of the entire handwritten papers of the writer Juan Pablo Forner which were in the possession of the scholar María Jiménez Salas. Within this collection the existence of a little-known manuscript concerning Observaciones sobre la Historia Universal Sacro-Profana de Tomás Borrego written by Forner justifies my study of this version of the Extremaduran author’s notes which were later incorporated into the complete manuscript which has survived.. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we examine twenty-four editions of chapbooks which are products of the Valencian press of Joan Navarro in the period 1560 to 1563. All of these chapbooks make up one volume preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale Augusta, Perugia, catalogued under the shelfmark [I L 1402]. Of these twenty-four editions, we study specifically seven chapbooks in which are to be found the texts of thirty-four Spanish ballads ('romances'). We go on to confirm the widespread influence these poems enjoyed from 1547 to 1573, highlighting some of the points of contact between the versions found in the Perugia volume and those included in other chapbooks, songbooks or ballad collections printed in the sixteenth century. Among the most noteworthy precedents of these seven chapbooks are anthologies of ballads published in Antwerp, the silvas printed in Zaragoza by Esteban G. de Nájera and the Cancionero llamado flor de enamorados compiled by Joan Timoneda, whose first edition, now lost, is thought to have been printed in Valencia between 1556 and 1557. These seven chapbooks are, in their turn, important precedents to the Rosas de romances compiled by Joan Timoneda and printed by Joan Navarro in 1573. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary texts which do not conform to a realist and mimetic practice have been generally disregarded by critics in the context of Mexican literature, even though a significant number of texts following this tendency have been published since the nineteenth century. This paper focuses on science fiction, one of the categories of ‘the unusual’ in Mexican literary productions, and more specifically on the subgenre of the dystopia. Many examples of this tendency can be found in different literary and filmic expressions, particularly since the end of the twentieth century. Through the analysis of four novels by recognized contemporary authors (Fuentes, Aridjis, Boullosa and Sheridan), this article explores the main themes present in this tendency and proposes a distinct typology for this subgenre in contemporary Mexican fiction, which addresses the extra-textual connections between the texts and the tragic events witnessed by the country in the last decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to understand the position of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in both international and Spanish literary historiography from the point of view of the concept ofarrière-garde. In Spanish literary historiography, with the exception of his naturalistic works, Blasco Ibáñez's novels have either been dismissed or relegated to a peripheral position in contrast to the canon of the Generation of 1898, on the one hand, and Modernism, on the other. This situation is explored in relation to the way Blasco Ibáñez himself understood his career, as explained in his ‘Carta’ to Julio Cejador y Frauca, who included it in hisHistoria. Furthermore, the role played by translations is also taken into consideration with regard to the circulation of works by Blasco Ibáñez, a factor which does not apply in the case of either the Generation of 1898 or Modernist writers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bernardo Atxaga in Obabakoak (1988), as elsewhere, develops deep metaliterary discussions about Euskara, the Basque language. This paper puts Atxaga's metaliterature into the context of Boccaccio and Cervantes linguistic fights, romantic philosophy, and today's linguistic politics. The Euskara language has a negligible literary tradition according to a number of Basque authors, such as B. Atxaga and Iban Zaldua, among others. Anything written before the 1980s would be of little value by international standards, but Obabakoak changed the landscape. Atxaga offers a combination of wit, literary tradition and theory, and good story telling at the service of literature written in Euskara. But, building a literary tradition in Euskara is also a political stance, and Atxaga's own linguistic politics are based on an artful discussion of plagiarism, originality, language status, and literary tradition. Yet, in Obabakoak, the debate on how to create an international tradition for Basque literature ends in the mumbling of a wilful narrator neutralized by a lizard that eats his brain and words away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the theatrical genre of the loa as it evolved in Spain in the second half of the seventeenth century. After reviewing some of the main studies which discuss this genre and outlining the main stages in its development, this article considers the generic type of the loa entremesada from two perspectives: discussing, on the one hand, the growing professionalism that affected all theatrical manifestations, including the loa; and, on the other, considering the aspirations entertained by those who composed works of this kind to attract noble and royal patronage. For it is necessary to take account of such influential factors when evaluating the products of the Spanish stage in that period. The context within which the loa entremesada evolved is that in which the commercial and court theatre operated and interacted, and in which both benefited by sharing playwrights, companies and the repertory of plays, despite the different demands made by their different stage-facilities and -techniques. Whatever the type of theatre in which it is performed, whether palace-theatre or corral, the loa always functions on two levels: on the restricted level of its own content, and on the other level where it illuminates the more extensive dramatic work which it both precedes and serves to introduce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entry into Barcelona of the Nationalist troops in January 1939 and the taking over of official information in the city by the Director of the Servicio Nacional de Propaganda, the poet Dionisio Ridruejo , meant the end of the style of information dissemination established by the democratic government. Ridruejo replaced the journalist Jaume Miravitlles, who throughout the war headed the Comissariat de Propaganda, the official organ of the autonomous government of Catalonia. This paper attempts to reconstruct and analyse the final efforts of official republican propaganda in Catalonia, and contrasts them with the propaganda of occupied Barcelona, which, in nationalist terminology, had just been ‘liberated’. We will analyse how the end of the Civil War represents the replacement of propaganda carried out by professionals in persuasion by an alternative supervised, and, often dictated, by the military. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the death of the dictator, Spanish cinema began to offer a series of films committed to portraying the Civil War. These narratives often selected characters from the Republican side—civilians or combatants—underscoring their suffering and the violence that characterized this era. Yet, it could be asked whether these productions genuinely attempt to rehabilitate the Republicans, who previously had been so vilified. In contrast to the films made during the dictatorship, which were based on simplified and mythical representations, do these new stories succeed in creating new myths? This paper sets out to examine what has changed and what has not in representations of the Civil War in film productions from the transition to democracy onwards. In this way, we can analyse how aspects of the Francoist myth-making persist in certain films which retain obvious links to the cinema of the dictatorship. It also explores how the representation of the war evolves in five films dealing with two Republican myths: the siege of Madrid and the defence of Barcelona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén and the English Hispanist John Brande Trend through the correspondence they exchanged in the time period between the 1930s and the 1950s. It is not a full catalogue and comprises only sixteen letters. The exile is a topic that comes up frequently in them, one of the main reasons that triggered this correspondence, and is present in many of the letters: first during the war when Guillén asked Trend, then a university Professor of Spanish in Cambridge, for his support to be appointed reader in Cambridge, which would allow him to leave Spain; and in the following decades, when nostalgic memories of the Spain of the Twenties surface in their words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]