Jose Maria Merino (La Coruna 1941) is one of the most notable novelists in Spain's contemporary literary panorama. His narrative work consists, as of now, of six novels and two collections of short stories. Jose Maria Merino belongs to the second moment of the "Generation of 68" proposed by the critic Santos Sanz Villanueva, a moment characterized by the interest in storytelling and by the transgression of the imperatives of the two major novelistic tendencies existing until the middle Seventies: social realism and experimentalism. This is the first in depth study of the works of Jose Maria Merino. After reviewing the characteristics of the Spanish novel during the Seventies and Eighties, I analyze the narratives of our author using three broad areas: space, time and subject. In all of them the literary mechanisms aimed at correcting the everyday notions of those three categories stand out. With metafiction and the fantastic as predominant directions, all cases have mechanisms that favor the production of stories; be it the privileged role that the physical environments play in the genesis of the narrated events, the reflections on the plot and the plotting of lives and fictions, or the large number of "mestizos," "aindiados," "indianos" and of characters composed of dream and vigil, past and present or reality and literature. The scenes of recognition many times guide the dissolution of the subjects, who need fictions to recompose themselves as completed entities. Merino's fiction, also "mestiza," mixes elements of the classic novel with some experimentalist notions, always with the freedom of invention and the interest in storytelling as the only imperatives to be followed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8180 |
| Date | 01 January 1991 |
| Creators | Candau-Perez, Antonio F |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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