Translation Rights TQE / Multiple Dwellings

Comparative literature has rarely been a major theme among contemporary Spanish essayists, perhaps because it involves the complex methodology of a specialty that covers a great number of texts and combines various disciplines that range from human and social sciences to philosophy. We are therefore delighted to present one of the most ambitious and conscientious essays written in Spain in recent years, for its author, Claudio Guillén, is an authority on this internationally recognised subject.

Both the curious reader and the specialist will be lured by simply glancing at the index of Multiples moradas (Multiple Dwellings). Its pages are a compound of important figures, tendencies and styles, yet the critical eye of the author has also been capable of illuminating specific areas of the humanities: the pain of exile in literature, the emergence of the pictorial notion of the landscape, the idea of obscenity in classical erotica, the evolution of the epistolary genre, the birth of literary nationalisms, and so on.

“I  am concerned with literary history, I am concerned with the form it adopts in our minds”, writes Guillén in the prologue. “I believe this form to be a common experience, which, however meandering and wild is, I insist, shared by many others, and has been developed within many fields by historians, critics and investigators, not all of whom are contemporary, but whom I most admire and to whom I am most indebted”.

Claudio Guillén (1924) studied in France and the United States. During World War II he enlisted as a voluntary soldier in  the army of General Charles de Gaulle. He then became professor at various North American universities such as Princeton, UCLA and Harvard, where for many years he was director of the department of comparative literature. He then returned to Spain as head of department in the Autonomous and Pompeu Fabra Universities in  Barcelona. He has been a visiting professor in Germany, Italy, and Brazil, among other countries. In his numerous articles, such as Literature as System (1971), Entre lo uno y lo diverso (Between the One and the Diverse), 1985, El primer Siglo de Oro (The First Golden Age), 1988, and Teorías de la Historia Literaria (Theories of Literary History), 1989, his main themes have always been the novel and poetry of the 16th and 20th centuries, as well as  and the theories of genre and of literary history.