Bücher der Reihe Iberian and Latin American Studies: the Arts, Literature, and Identity

This collection of essays focuses on the variety of women's life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic world. The authors analyse women who have expressed their sense of identity through diaries, autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, travel writing and poetry, as well as forms of visual art, examining how they represent themselves and others.

This book offers a significant, original and timely contribution to the study of one of the most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas. The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas' writing, the autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition. Through focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile, the author analyses the ways in which Arenas' writing emblemises a complex process of identification with, and rejection of, his homeland - always an imagined place and which is, as the place of his origins, intrinsically related to the maternal. She examines how the maternal and the motherland are conflated and how the narrator-protagonists' identification is always in relation to, and dependent upon, this dominant motif. The book also explores the extent to which Arenas' writing is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland, and shows that Arenas suffered the exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus.

Investigates wider issues concerning the recovery and performability of these documentary traces, addressing their position within the contemporary debate over historical and cultural memory, their relationship to the contemporary stage, the insights they offer into the experience and performance of exile.

The Opaque Experience is a thorough investigation of the changes in aesthetics that occurred in Argentina and Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. It analyses a slow transformation of the status of the literary, which has become increasingly manifest in writing practices against the backdrop of a wider aesthetic transformation that strongly questioned traditional conventions. Through readings of works by Silviano Santiago, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, Néstor Perlongher and Ana Cristina Cesar ¿ among others ¿ in relation to the works of artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, the book seeks to understand the evolution of the notion of art. Its central argument is that artistic works of the period traverse an experiential drive that transcends artistic form. Special importance is given to historical context: when the frontiers between public and private are demolished by the authoritarian state; when «bare life» becomes the political category par excellence; and when art positions itself in an «expanded field». Exposed to the face of the world, these art forms combine different and destabilizing logics that reveal a vulnerability of the subject, and of experience, that is not in harmony with the notion of autonomous subjects or work. It is not just a matter of a transformation of sensibilities, but rather a transformation of the meaning of art in contemporary society.

Writing Travel investigates the ways in which Roberto Bolano and Juan Jose Saer engage with travel and space in their work. It enquires into the politics of representation and the cultural and ideological implications at stake in "writing travel" and focusses on the thematic and formal representation of travel and space in their literature.

Este libro se plantea observar la transmision transgeneracional de la memoria del conflicto de 1936-1939. El objetivo principal es la formulacion de pautas interpretativas que ayuden a parcelar la rapida evolucion del panorama literario de la Espana actual en lo que se refiere a la representacion del pasado conflictivo de la nacion.

«Figures of Exile is an excellent volume of essays carefully curated by Daniela Omlor and Eduardo Tasis that pays a long overdue homage to the late Nigel Dennis, one of the most important Hispanists of his generation. It does so brilliantly by bringing together a group of talented international scholars ¿ the majority of whom can be considered as Professor Dennis¿s disciples ¿ who each offer original and illuminating perspectives on a variety of topics and authors related to the Spanish Republican exile, a field for which Nigel Dennis was an inescapable point of reference.» (Javier Letrán, University of St Andrews)¿Figures of Exile contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the field of exile studies and aims to refamiliarise a wider readership with the Spanish exile of 1939. It provides new perspectives on the work of canonical figures of this exile, such as Rafael Alberti, Luís Cernuda, José Bergamín, Pedro Salinas, Francisco Ayala, Emilio Prados, Federico García Lorca or María Zambrano, and brings to the fore the work of less-studied figures like José Díaz Fernández, Juan David García Baca, Ernesto Guerra da Cal, Nuria Parés, María Luisa Elío, María Teresa León and Tomás Segovia. Rather than being disparate, this broad scope, which ranges from first generation to second generation exiles, from Galicia to Andalusia, from philosophers to poets, is testament to the wide-ranging impact of the Spanish Republican exile.