The Spanish novel in a turbulent century. This collection of studies by eighteen prominent theorists and critics offers a diverse panorama of the modern Spanish novel seen through the prism of Spain's recent political, cultural and ideological history. It considers the development of the novel as a social mirror and as a changing literary form, torn between the tradition of stern realism and the aesthetics of rupture affecting all Western literature from the Avant-Garde to the Postmodern age. While some essays emphasise the Spanish cultural context and canonical writers, others are of a broader nature, grouping lesser-known writers under certain literary tendencies: the metaphysical novel, the urban novel, recuperative accounts of the Civil War, feminine first-person narrations, and the rise of the popular detective, historical, and erotic novels. Three studies address the resurgence of the Catalan, Basque and Galician novel and their departure from a poetics of identity to one of global concerns. Interdisciplinary approaches address the reciprocal impacts of literature and cinema, and the effects of the marketplace on the consumption of fiction are not forgotten. The Companion provides ample bibliographies and a valuable chronology, while all titles and quotations are translated into English. Contributors: Marta E. Altisent, Katarzyna Olga Beilin, Ramon Buckley, Jose F. Colmeiro, Stacey Dolgin Casado, Sebastiaan Faber, David K. Herzberger, Carlos Alex Longhurst, Kathleen N. March, Cristina Martinez-Carazo, Alfredo Martinez Exposito, Nina L. Molinaro, Gonzalo Navajas, Mari Jose Olaziregi, Janet D. Perez, Randolph D. Pope, Josep Miquel Sobrer, H. Rosi Song.

In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Mercè Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this Broken Mirror, the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic-most notably the Spanish Civil War. Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young fishmonger's daughter married to a wealthy old man, the story shifts from one perspective to another, reflecting from myriad angles the founding of a matriarchal dynasty-and its eventual, seemingly inevitable disintegration. A family saga extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship, A Broken Mirror is finally also a novel about the inexorable passing of time. Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) has emerged as perhaps the most important fiction writer of the twentieth century in Catalan literature and is one of the most interesting writers of the contemporary Spanish literary world. She is primarily known in this country for her novel The Time of the Doves, published in English translation. Josep Miquel Sobrer is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. The editor of Catalan Review, he has also edited and translated an anthology of Catalan texts, Catalonia: A Self-Portrait.

In its moment of great splendor the novel was held as a mirror of society: Merce Rodoreda shatters that mirror in this, her most ambitious novel, which tells its story in brilliant fragments, a vision reflected and refracted and finally coming together in a richly articulated mosaic of life. Through this "Broken Mirror", the reader sees events and characters spanning three generations and composing a kaleidoscopic family history ranging over six decades and turning upon events both intimate and historic--most notably the Spanish Civil War.
Opening with Teresa Goday, the lovely young fishmonger's daughter married to a wealthy old man, the story shifts from one perspective to another, reflecting from myriad angles the founding of a matriarchal dynasty--and its eventual, seemingly inevitable disintegration. A family saga extending from the prosperous Barcelona of the 1870s to the advent of the Franco dictatorship, "A Broken Mirror" is finally also a novel about the inexorable passing of time.