Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism
Editor: J. P. Spicer-Escalante and Lara Anderson
Date Of Publication: May 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2067-7
Isbn: 1-4438-2067-9
Literary naturalism, within the Hispanic context, has traditionally been read as a graphic realist school or movement linked predominantly to late nineteenth century literary production. The essays in Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism—written by scholars from different generations, nationalities and ideological backgrounds—propose a major revisionist contribution to the study of Hispanic naturalism. Based on a theoretical proposal that re-semanticizes naturalismo as a diachronic counter-metanarrative phenomenon that transcends the chronological and geographic limitations imposed by traditional criticism on naturalism, the collection provides new readings of traditional naturalist fare as well as re-readings of works that have not been read, within the bounds of conventional criticism, as naturalist. Re-read within the proposed theoretical framework, its essays demonstrate the countless ways in which Hispanic naturalist texts–literary and more recently, filmic—continue to frankly engage the societal problematics that has impeded true social, political, economic and cultural progress from taking place in the Hispanic world from the turbulent fin-de-siècle period of the nineteenth century through the present day, globalized context. Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism is thus also an open invitation to the scholarly community to re-consider other socio-critical works within the Hispanic naturalist context that observe and reflection upon social issues that continue to plague Hispanic society today.

J.P. SPICER-ESCALANTE is Associate Professor of Nineteenth Century Hispanic American Literature and Culture at Utah State University (U.S.A) and a Visiting International Scholar at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Visiones patológicas nacionales: Lucio Vicente López, Eugenio Cambaceres y Julián Martel ante la distopía argentina finisecular, has edited critical editions of works by Argentine authors Eugenio Cambaceres and Eduarda Mansilla, and is Founding Co-Director and Managing Editor of Decimonónica: Revista de Producción Cultural Hispánica Decimonónica. His essays on Hispanic naturalism, Avant-garde, and travel writing have appeared in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Excavatio and Brújula, amongst other scholarly venues. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Excavatio and of the Advisory Board of Stockcero, Inc., Spanish & Latin American Literature Publishers.

LARA ANDERSON is Convenor of Spanish Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Allegories of Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Spain: The Female Consumer in the Novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós as well as articles on Spanish culinary nationalization, gender and the nation. Some of her most recent essays have appeared in History of European Ideas, Romance Studies and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. She is also a member of the editorial board of IXQUIC: Revista Hispánica Internacional de Análisis Literario y Cultural.

AU NATUREL: (RE)READING HISPANIC NATURALISM, in the words of J.P. Spicer-Escalante, proposes revisiting Hispanic naturalism as “a diachronic post modern socio-aesthetic phenomenon”. With the publication of this volume contemporary readers and scholars finally have a significant revisionist critical interpretation of Naturalism, traditionally viewed as a corpus or archive of late Nineteenth Century textual productions influenced by European models, especially the works of Zola. In short, we have a more satisfying reading of Hispanic literature in the context of the inconclusive transnational modernizations of the Hispanic and Western world. The diverse essays in this volume bear witness to Linda Hutcheon’s notion of a metafictive impulse that evidences the presence of the past in the texts of the present. Naturalism’s fundamental nature in the essays of this volume is thus (re)ordered and (re)cast so that it constitutes a meaningful element of Hispanic Modernity conceived as one of the multitudinous manifestations of the modern world’s constant movements, rotations, and reinventions.

—Ivan A. Schulman, Professor Emeritus of Spanish & Comparative Literature, University of Illinois

‘The volume is a necessary and welcome addition to the existing scholarship on Hispanic naturalism.’

‘Au Naturel’. (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism proves to be a coherent and compelling study of the composite effects of naturalism on artist production…’

--Ellen Mayock, Washington and Lee University, Virginia

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