The development of basic textual strategies in Spanish fiction from 1902 to 1926 is the focus of this study. Challenging traditional views of the relationships between the literature produced by the Generation of 1898 and the Spanish vanguard movement, Spires traces through analyses of select works a process of evolution beginning at the turn of the century and continuing into the 1920s. Spires demonstrates how the somewhat tentative strategies of the first decade became more daring in the second. As opposed to the extant historical, autobiographical, and thematic surveys of this period, Transparent Simulacra features structuralist and post-structuralist readings of fiction by Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Pérez de Ayala, Gómez de Serna, Jarnés, and Salinas. These approaches offer not only revisionist views of a literary period but also revisionist readings of some of Spain's best-known fiction.

The Spanish novel in a turbulent century.

The golden specter of El Dorado and its promises of unlimited wealth have haunted Western iconography for centuries. The Miraculous Lie: Lope de Aguirre and the Search for El Dorado in the Latin American Historical Novel is a fascinating study of five twentieth-century Latin American novels that focus on one particular search for El Dorado: the infamous 1559 expedition, headed by Pedro Ursua and the first legendary colonial rebel against the crown, Lope de Aguirre. Author Bart Lewis approaches five works--Arturo Uslar Pietri's El Camino de El Dorado, Abel Posses's Daim-n, Miguel Otero Silva's Lope de Aquirre, Pr'ncipe de la Libertad, Jorge Ernesto Funes's Una Lanza por Lope de Aguirre, and FZlix _lvarez SOenz's Cr-nica de Blasfemos--as representations of Latin American literature during the mid to late twentieth-century and as re-examinations of the notorious figure of Lope de Aguirre. Lewis is therefore able to provide not only a successful chronology of the stylistic development of the Latin American novel, but also a thoughtful analysis of how these novels appropriate Aguirre and give a revisionist and authentic voice to the Latin American cultural founder. Wonderfully engaging and beautifully written, The Miraculous Lie examines the search for El Dorado in modern Latin American literature as the search for self-determination.