Guillén at McGill: Essays for a Centenary Celebration

Jorge Guillén (1893-1984) has long been recognized as the dean of modern Spanish poets and an ethical as well as creative influence both in and outside of his native Spain. This collection marks Guillen’s special connection with McGill and the Montreal celebration of the poet’s birth with essays that provide new perspectives on his life and work, an effort of reengagement with the previous criticism, and some provocative critical realignments. Guillén is presented as a major exponent of European high modernism and his relationships with particular masters and friends are reassessed. Particularly exciting are the “literary” readings of Guillén’s voluminous, and still largely unpublished, correspondence in which the complex inter-textualities of autobiography and aesthetics are unravelled to allow for new period contextualizations. This is a record of the multifaceted “state of the question” in Guillén criticism and the incorporation of some subtle demonstrations of theoretically informed critical practice into that corpus.
Contributors: Birute Ciplijauskaite, John C. Wilcox, Jose Barroso Castro, Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, Ignacio Soldevila, Juan Cano Ballesta, Howard T. Young, and Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga.