Bilingual Legacies

Bilingual Legacies examines the role of father figures in shaping several major authors’ gender and linguistic consciousness in Spain after Franco’s dictatorship.

Anna Casas Aguilar is an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia.

"An important contribution to both the study of autobiography and bilingualism in post-Franco Spain. A richly detailed analysis of canonical and less known titles puts them in a new light where the politics of language become inseparable from family stories. Bilingual Legacies is essential reading about the intricacies of literary depictions of Spanish and Catalan linguistic identities."

Javier Krauel, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Colorado at Boulder:

"Through brilliant close readings, Bilingual Legacies tackles politically fraught issues of literary, linguistic, and gender subjectivity. It also reveals the centrality, as well as the potential lines of fracture, of the masculinist and patriarchal literary economy in which the authors operated. This is an important book, one that helps us better understand the linguistic and gender dynamics of contemporary literary discourses in Spain and Catalonia."

Mario Santana, Associate Professor of Spanish Literature, University of Chicago:

"Through an illuminating reading of the autobiographical works of four major literary figures – Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janés – Anna Casas Aguilar interrogates the complex interplay of compliance and rebellion and exposes how familial affiliation impacted their lives as writers and particularly their choice of literary language."