Idle Fictions: Hispanic Vanguard Novel, 1926-34 - Hardcover

"This witty and provocative study represents a radical departure from the traditional volumes of Hispanic literary criticism. It breaks the established patterns in isolating the novels under study and treating the vanguard movement as a self-generating phenomenon. Perez Firmat's book may be irreverent and iconoclastic; it is also richly perceptive, thoughtful, and a good read as well." --Maryellen Bieder," Modern Language Studies"

The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel's development. Yet, as Perez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated "a class war not between social classes but between literary classes." Concentrating on source material not widely available, Perez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of their publication, then develops a reading of them based on the intellectual context of this reception. A new preface and an appendix on vanguard biographies have been added to this paperback edition.