Professor Labanyi gives us a rapid overview of Spanish literature — here meaning "literature from Spain", rather than "literature in Spanish" — in the usual forced-march style of these Very Short Introductions. Instead of a traditional chronological account, she chooses to divide things up under four big subject-headings.

Multilingualism and porous borders looks at the interplay between writings in Arabic, Basque, Castilian, Catalan and Galician from the Middle Ages to present-day regional autonomy, but also at the place of Spanish literature within the supranational medieval categories of Romance and Arabic literature, and makes it clear that all these categories are more fluid and less self-contained than we like to assume. Spanish literature and modernity looks at the political context of Spain from the Golden Age to the post-Franco period and how writers engaged with it. Gender and sexuality looks at writing by and about women and LGBT+ people, and finally Cultural patrimony goes in a slightly less predictable direction, investigating the Spanish approach to literary museums, shrines, and the ever-flourishing Cervantes-Industry.

Labanyi's chief field of interest seems to be in 20th century literature, so we get a lot more about Goytisolo (star of at least two chapters) than about Quevedo and Tirso de Molina, but she tells us enough about the 17th century to give us a reasonable feel for what to look out for, and she picks up some interesting topics like the importance of female-to-male cross-dressing on stage and the unexpectedly subversive nature of some of Teresa of Avila's writings.

Not the only book you'll need to read about Spanish literature, but it does what it's supposed to and it probably undermines a few preconceptions along the way too. ( )

Spain is in the news for all the wrong reasons at the moment, so I thought it was time to get on with my reading of my latest in the VSI series: Spanish Literature, A Very Short Introduction. It turned to be even more interesting than I expected it to be because it began by challenging my idea of what Spanish literature is.
Labanyi explains in the introduction why she has organised the material by themes focussing on current critical debates and why, although she gives the historical context its rightful place, she has linked it to issues of interest to contemporary readers. It’s also a reader-friendly text because she assumes no prior knowledge but rather that readers will be intellectually curious.
First of all she debunks the common view of Don Quixote and Don Juan as tragic idealists. bent on realising an impossible dream. Cervantes, she says, unequivocally depicts Don Quixote as mad and a butt of humour. [Well, at least I got that part right when I read it myself.] Don Juan, OTOH,

is an example of how not to behave, whose sacrilege in defying God is stressed throughout. He is also guilty of flouting patriarchal authority, killing the father of one of his female victims – a high ranking nobleman – whose statue drags him to hell. The Trickster of Seville is a play about blasphemy and disrespect for authority. (p.2)

These characters were reinvented as tragic idealists in the Romantic period via German theorists and Mozart’s opera. But for political purposes in the C20th, they were reinvented again, as emblems of a tragically defeated Spain, the characters having the heroic idealism Spain needed but didn’t have in real life in the 1898 war with the USA (when Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.) In the C20th, Don Quixote and Don Juan were held responsible for the crisis of humanism:

[For the critic Ramiro de Maeztu (1874-1936)] Don Juan represented the destructive egoism into which liberal modernity had degenerated, while Don Quixote embodied a hopelessly unpragmatic altruism. (p.4)

Other C20th critics interpreted Don Juan as an allegory of aggressive Western individualism; an a symbol of European imperialist expansion, or the fascist superman who forces the (feminised) masses into submission. [Which just goes to show, IMO, that the book ultimately belongs to its readers, who can and do make of it whatever suits them at the time!]
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/05/spanish-literature-a-very-short-introduction... ( )

My knowledge of the history of Spanish Literature, basically starts & ends with Don Quixote, jump forward a few hundred years and I’m on safer ground. Like most people I’m aware that Miguel de Cervantes(1547 – 1616) is one of the names behind the invention of the modern novel, in around the 16th century, but there is a massive gap in my knowledge of nearly half a millennia, luckily this is where this book comes in.
A Very Short Introduction – Spanish Literature (Oxford University Press), provides a handy guide to what turns out to be a rich literary history & in the process defines what it is that makes a national literature. From conquerors to exiles, from the highbrow to the downtrodden, this book sheds light on the multifaceted character of a culture & the literary treasures it has produced. Although this is a small book - at about a 144 pages - it manages to cover a lot of ground through it’s chapter headings

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/very-short-introduction-to.html ( )