This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets

"Aquirre-Otezia theorizes about the Republicans who wrote about Spain (and themselves) from abroad, and he argues that a full comprehension of Spanish literature must decenter tradition to include and elevate dissident exile culture."

S. Miller, Texas A&M University, CHOICE

"This Ghostly Poetry is engaged with history, but resists easy reduction to the analysis of ‘content.’ With impressive erudition, this book will be considered one of the best books on its subject matter, and will be required reading for graduate students."

Jonathan Mayhew, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas

"In this beautifully written book, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza reads the poetry of Spanish Republican exiles like Max Aub, Luis Cernuda, and Tomás Segovia to make an incisive argument against Spanish literary history as we know it. Rather than forcing the exiles’ work into the teleological, referential straitjacket of the nation, Aguirre liberates the disruptive power of poetic memory to blow that straitjacket to shreds. A groundbreaking intervention in literary history and memory studies, This Ghostly Poetry also makes a compelling case for the continued relevance – literary and political – of exilic poetry today."

Sebastiaan Faber, Department of Hispanic Studies, Oberlin College

"This Ghostly Poetry is not haunted by stale critical leftovers and dusty remnants but freshens up and refurbishes subtly overlooked Spanish Civil War exile déjà vu(s). A luminous journey!"

José María Naharro-Calderón, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Maryland

"Aguirre-Oteiza’s book is a most welcome addition to recent bibliography on Spanish Republican exile. His study of exilic poetry is the most significant contribution so far to this aspect of the field to appear in English. Aguirre-Oteiza provides new intellectual arguments to open up and explore the critical and aesthetic possibilities of a corpus that has been neglected by Hispanists for far too long. Through a theoretically savvy argument on the specificity of the poetic form that is convincingly backed by rigorous close textual analysis, this work authoritatively unveils the potential for (re)reading exilic poetry as transcending and resisting its containment within facile national paradigms. Moreover, by invoking their political role in memory work, Aguirre-Oteiza’s readings activate the capacity of these poetic voices to speak to and be appropriated by readers today. Combining conceptual ambition with historical specificity, this book will be of great interest to specialists in the fields of exile and diaspora studies, poetics and memory studies as a whole and in their intersections with twentieth-century Spanish literature and cultural studies, Hispanism, and transatlantic studies."

Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez, Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck University of London

"No one has ever studied more closely and intelligently the discontinuous relationship ‘between exilic poetry and national cultural and literary history.’ This book is a bold departure from critical approaches that consider poetry written in exile a hiatus in a national narrative. Aguirre-Oteiza uses the phenomenon of exile, broadly construed, as a means of questioning the reductive, nation-oriented or nationalistic narratives that have long dominated the historiography, criticism, anthologizing, and teaching of literature from Spain and Latin America. Resisting any sort of teleological narrative, Aguirre-Oteiza gives us an entirely new perspective on writers whose work is ‘non-chronological, border-crossing, plurivocal,’ multilingual and ‘ghostly,’ whether the ghostliness gestures toward an absent original, a poetic ancestor, or a former poetic self. This is an eye-opening book by an acute and gifted reader of poetry."

Christopher Maurer, Department of Romance Studies, Boston University