The Writer's Experience

These essays reflect a view admittedly skeptical of the movements, isms, and theories devised by many scholars in their reading of important writers. Earle prefers to see Cervantes, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriela Mistral, and Garcia Marquez, for example, as basically autonomous. Like most great authors, they don't fit within trends. Two words in this book's subtitle - self and circumstance - signal a concept of the writer's function in Spain and Hispanic America as primarily autobiographical and historical. Ortega y Gasset's declaration, Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, is really every writer's dictum - particularly of those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who experienced in a vital way the ambiguities of the modern Hispanic World.