Books in the Iberian and Latin American Studies: the Arts, Literature, and Identity series

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.

Offers the exploration of cultural memory in Portugal and Spain, two countries that are normally studied in isolation from one another due to linguistic divergences. This book contains an important theoretical survey of cultural memory and a comparative analysis of the historical background influencing studies of memory in the Iberian Peninsula.

Jorge Semprun is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities. Although Semprun's work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprun's work goes beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view of his A uvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory in some of Semprun's works, drawing on current debates in the field of memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts, such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity, to be examined and discussed.

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 official centenary commemorating the Mexican Revolution of 1910 led to this specially commissioned volume, which explores notions such as 'revisitation', haunting and memorialization through a detailed examination of Mexican art, photography, film, narrative fiction, periodicals, travel-testimonies and poetry.

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.