Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. The Spanish Novel from 1939 to 1970 and beyond. 2. Los dominios del lobo and Travesía del horizonte : Progymnasmata. 3. El siglo : A Question of Style. 4. El hombre sentimental : The Artistic Imagination. 5. Todas las almas : Imagining the Autobiographical. 6. Corazón tan blanco : The Effects of Repetition. 7. Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí : The Interconnectedness of the World. 8. the Potential of Literature. Bibliography.

Javier Marías is a major contemporary Spanish novelist who has enjoyed remarkable international success and recognition. He is a writer who has undergone a singular and clearly discernible novelistic evolution and has forged a very distinctive style of his own. It is this formal development that this book traces through a study of his works from Los dominios del lobo (1971) to Negra espalda del tiempo (1998). With the help of a wide range of 20th-century literary theories and criticism, it strives to show that in order to escape realism and Spanishness and to make his way into literature, Marías forges an intricate style which progressively develops and matures, and which creates highly suggestive and elaborate imaginative worlds, a literature with a particular ontology, ultimately capable of inventing reality. This book is the first full-length study of Javier Marías's work to be published so far and serves both as an introduction to, and a close examination of, the work of a major European writer.

Description based on print version record.