Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity

Arthur J. Hughes is an associate professor of Spanish at Ohio University and the director of the Latin American Studies Program. He received his Spanish Philology Licenciatura from the Universidad Complutense, Spain, and a PhD in Hispanic literature and culture from Arizona State University.

• Introduction: Placing Moix in Context – Modernity, Autobiography, and Reflexivity – Writing the Modern Self in Moix’s Autobiographical Works – Playing With the Body: Monotheisms, Sexuality, and History in Nuestro virgen de los mártires and El amargo don de la belleza – Transgressing Through Carnival and Violence in Món mascle – Reflexivity, Space, and Gender in Sadístic, esperpèntic i àdhuc metafísic – Aesthetics, Sexualities, and Excess in Amami Alfredo!: Polvo de estrellas: novela con soprano and La herida de la Esfinge: capriccio romántico – Conclusion: Navigating Discontinuity – Index.

“All writers occupy conflicted and contradictory ideological spaces that make it ill-advised to attempt to reduce their work to one set of guiding writerly principles, one particular vision of their personal and social lived experiences, one grounding sense of the self and a witness to history. Terenci Moix is a writer whose categorization has been so problematical that it can almost be said to have kept him from occupying a premier place in contemporary Spanish fiction. Moix is an outstanding writer, and he has much of an original interpretation of contemporary Spain to contribute. Arthur J. Hughes’s Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels is a nuanced examination of the many conflictual forces at work in Moix’s writing, only one of which is the relationship between Spanish and Catalan. In the process, Hughes provides us with a superb scholarly study that makes us aware, once again, of the tremendously contradictory forces at work in contemporary culture in Spain.”—David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies, Faculty Head of Spanish and Portuguese, Arizona State University