Roberta Johnson

Epilogue: Reflections on the Geographical Turn

Johnson argues that this volume’s essays break through the temporal bias that has constrained studies of Spanish Modernism by offering geographically oriented readings of canonical and non-canonical texts. Considering geographical connections, especially Spain’s cultural relations with the Western Hemisphere–both North and South America–opens up Peninsular literature and thought in a way that is both provocative and fruitful. Such an approach moves us beyond the Spain/Latin America divide that plagues much previous research and curricula. The “geographical turn,” as Johnson calls the orientation of this volume, has the potential to revive Peninsular Studies that have been suffering in some foreign language departments and programs in U.S. colleges and universities. One surprising result of the “geographical turn” is the resuscitation of forgotten figures who are studied in several essays. The essays are uniformly innovative and stimulating and point toward new directions for the future.

Carmen Laforet’s Nada: From Letter to Novel

Abstract Before she began to compose her first novel Nada, Carmen Laforet wrote many letters to friends about her experiences in Barcelona shortly after the Spanish Civil War. These letters contain the seeds of the novel and (as is argued in this article) inspired a number of epistolary features in the novels structure and style—its first-person narrative voice that begs for an addressee, its enigmatic ellipses, gaps and fissures, its voyeurism and its embedded letters. Considering Nadas epistolarity answers some of the questions that have been raised about the novels supposed autobiographical and confessional characteristics.

Francisco Ayala: Boxer and Angel

Francisco Ayalas vanguard works written from 1928 to 1930 are often considered a brief parenthesis in his narrative oeuvre, which is otherwise ethically, philosophically, and/or politically engaged. This essay sidesteps the controversy over vanguard aesthetics versus ethically committed literature in Ayalas fiction to analyze the title story of El boxeador y un angel (1929) within the context of Ayalas early biography, boxing literature, angel symbology, and works of the 1920s by Gabriel Miro, Rafael Alberti, and Azorin that employ angel figures. I suggest that Ayala joins the disparate elements-a boxer and an angel-in an allegory of the writers struggle in the modem metropolis and his path to aesthetic creation.