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Covering nine major works of Catalan writer Terenci Moix, Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels places Moix’s fictional prose against the backdrop of his autobiographical novels, thus highlighting the importance of the author’s daily life experiences and their transmutation into the virtuality of fiction. This study, the first to look at Moix’s works in both Catalan and Castilian, and in both autobiography and fiction, contests the implicit critical perspective that examines this period using the dichotomies of modernity/postmodernity and autobiography/fiction. It proposes Spanish modernity as a unique phenomenon that produces a distinctive personality as a result of the tensions of the period. Arthur J. Hughes’s examination of Moix’s modernity forces a new look at the notion of Spanish postmodernity usually assumed to be a result of the transition to democracy after the death of Franco, providing a new perspective on the separation of autobiographic and fictional genres that argues for the reflection of one in the other 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 “In Reflexive Writing and the Negotiation of Spanish Modernity: Autobiography and Fiction in Terenci Moix’s Novels, Arthur J. Hughes offers both a practical and theoretical description of the ways in which Catalonian novelist/essayist/autobiographer Terenci Moix (1942–1993) subverts sexual and political ‘norms’ by subjecting these questionable commonplaces to a dramatic reversal and augmentation. This volume shows clearly how Moix takes aim at the self-seeking about-faces and strictures that political, religious, and literary institutions have imposed on many of humanity’s original social and sexual pluralities.”—Thomas R. Franz, Professor Emeritus of Spanish, Ohio University
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