Assuming the Light

Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentieth-century Spanish-American novel. His literary apprenyiceship in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s is arguably the most crucial and the least understood period of his career. In forging his definitions of Guatemalan cultural identity and Spanish-American modernity from a French vantage point, he made literary innovations and generated cultural paradoxes which have proved central tosubsequent generations of writers. This study of his early academic writings, journalism and short fiction, and of his first major novel, El senor presidente, provides a pre-history of the contemporary Spanish-American novel.

Stephen Henighan is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Guelph, Ontario.