Speaking of which, I'm reading a history of Spain's crime fiction and,
just like you point out, their genre offerings in the first half of
the 20th century were heavily influenced by France and, to a lesser
extent, the British procedural. Fortunately, most of these is no
longer true. It seems Spanish crime fiction is going through a very
creative period with numerous new writers and titles. It'd be
interesting to see if any of them are eventually translated.
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "jacquesdebierue"
<jacquesdebierue@...> wrote:
>
> On the subject of Shakespeare, there was huge cross-fertilization
> (stealing, imitating, getting inspiration from) between the Italians,
> the Spaniards and the English. These guys were very aware of what the
> others were doing. An age of tremendous creativity, no question. The
> great Spanish century was followed by fussiness and a Baroque style
> that eventually became ridiculous (Baltasar Gracián, for example), and
> then from bad to worse until the late nineteenth century and then a
> couple of great generations of poets and novelists. By then, in fact
> since long before, the influence of France was overwhelming on Spanish
> literature, and there was also a fair amount of German influence.
> Literary ties with England were pretty much nonexistent. The
> spectacular rebirth in the twentieth century of literature in Spanish
> happened in Latin America, where most of the great writers were and
> are from. And those guys were heavily influenced by Faulkner and
> Hemingway, not so much by European or even Spanish models (there are
> notable exceptions, like Borges, Bioy and Alejo Carpentier).
>
> An interesting early noir writer is Argentinean Roberto Arlt, despised
> in his day for "writing ugly" but later considered a classic, with his
> reputation growing.
>
> Best,
>
> mrt
>
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