Within the historic events in the 1930's Spain, among whose most important outcome stands the triumph of the Spanish Second Republic (1931), Jose Diaz Fernandez released his book of essays, El Nuevo Romanticismo (The New Romanticism), a compendium of his observations on art, literature, feminism, liberalism, and politics, all five understood as parts of the vital and social processes. Besides being a panoramic scan of the issues that marked the Spanish and European culture during the period between wars, this book expresses a defined will to guide the artistic Avant Gardes and to consolidate the foundations of its aesthetics, with the intention of enabling them to contribute, alongside the labor movement, political parties and social collectives, to the radical transformations of a society bound to give birth to a new romanticism, understood as a return to the humane. As part of the generation who opposed the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, founded magazines and weeklies such as Postguerra or Nueva Espana, and leftwing publishing houses such as Cenit, Oriente or Zeus, this project is conceived departing from the analysis of the Goya and El Greco works, futurism and other avant garde expressions, as well as politics, fashion, and the critique of reformist liberalism. The present release, that reproduces the first 1930 edition, sets in an historic perspective the various issues discussed by Diaz Fernandez while sketching the literary and artistic backdrops that frame the author's stance in his quest for a critical art and a revolutionary literature.

La venus mecnica is one of the most important Spanish novels of the first half of the XXth Century. Written in 1929 it constitutes a key workpiece of the generation that led the largest social and political transform project of the period: a revolutionary middle class struggling for a new way of life, fostering a society free from exploitation and barbarism. Literally this novel constructed a new language by blending the formal avant-garde radicalism with social experiences critical of its own times. La venus mecnica has always had its place in the Spanish literature, as its six editions prove, even taking into account that those early decades were almost monopolized by the so called 98 generation and 27 generation. This edition focuses on understanding the literary project of this latter generation, the so called new romanticism, by studying the genealogy of its romantic ideas within their critical and social projections, highlighting ideological sources (such as that of Fermin Galan and the new social literature) as well as aesthetic ones (expressionism), while pointing out the enormous effort it must have meant for Diaz Fernandez to write in such a language as to fully express the conflictive experience with the surrounding world. Analyzed from an historical point of view this novel shows the author's responsibility in the opening of a new literary path for the humanely emancipating discourse, as well as in the building of an avant-garde aesthetic with a social and political orientation.

El blocao, Novela de la guerra marroqui, by Jose Diaz Fernandez constitutes one of the finest examples of the Modernist-Vanguardist aesthetics in Spanish literature. In a truly elegant way its author achieves his explicit goal to interest the reader in a different way than the usual: that is, by plunging him into an opaque and tragic world without heroes or outstanding individuals, the way I experienced Morocco then. Considered by some critics a short novel, by others a collection of stories or descriptions, it complies with the author's express intention to compose a novel with no unifying factor except for the atmosphere that the episodes share. The resulting book is a true literary gem, one of the Spanish novels of the 1920s that received the highest public and critical praise in its times, curiously and unjustly forgotten by critics later on. Often categorized as a pacifist novel, much in vogue after the First World War, in El blocao Jose Diaz Fernandez, deeply involved in Modernist-Vanguardist aesthetics, emphasizes Futurism's destructive momentum and reveals how the absence of conventional components of novels -detailed descriptions, plots, chronological development and psychological analyses of the characters- does not hamper the possibility of sharing with the reader the most vivid experiential originalities in the seven fragments that constitute the text. The result is high quality futuristic literature, beautifully crafted by combining the achievements of the artistic and the political vanguard movements. Not surprisingly, Jose Diaz Fernandez' works have been reevaluated in recent years, and his three novels, El blocao (1928), La Venus mecanica (1929), Octubre rojo en Asturias (1935), and his books of essays, El nuevo romanticismo (1930) are now viewed as some of the outstandingly original and distinguished texts of Spanish literature of the 1920s and 30s. In this edition, which follows the text of the 1928 edition, Professor Victor Fuentes has augmented his previous edition (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1976, 2 ed.) with a corpus of notes which will facilitate comprehension of the book by present-day readers, and a prologue which includes a fuller discussion of aesthetic and ideological parameters.