david spooner

Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
"Spooner notes that, aside from humans, most living organisms on earth achieve maturation through metamorphosis. In this text he extends the analyses begun in a previous work,that great works of music and literature represent a human attempt to experience something akin to metamorphosis. He hopes to show "that the history of the insect in Spanish and Spanish-American literature is a latent pivot upon which the inextricability of nature and the written word turns with transformatory power." In this analysis, he considers works by Rueda, Lorca, Damaso Alonso, Aleixandre, Antonio Machado, Cernuda, Salinas, Neruda, Paz, Eguren, Agustini and Carrera Andrade.

"This book is an extension of Dr. Spooner`s work on the interplay of insect processes and human culture. On one level, it is part of cultural-ecological criticism. Assessing the incursion of the South American rainforest ecology into the poetry of Silva, Darío and later Eguren, this study considers its impact on Rueda, Aleixandre, Jiménez, Lorca, Hernández and González, balancing this with a recognition of Spain`s indigenous post-romantic modernism. then while taking account of the insects in Juan Goytisolo`s novels, Spooner throws more light on the books of Márquez, Cortázar and Fuentes, where the striking of the medieval across the modern is interpreted as related to the metamorphoses of insects, and indeed to the process of literary creation itself."