Wagner’s immersion in the literary culture of Spain is seldom examined. This chapter explores his fascination with Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón in particular, as borne out by his private correspondence, public essays and via Cosima’s diaries. Here, Wagner’s personal characterisation of their literary value bears scrutiny as a facet of his self-understanding of drama within Opera and Drama, even if the role of Spanish culture within Wagner’s works is paltry. Canonical works such as Don Quixote testify to a shattering of the hero myth, the decadence of the ‘Christian romance of chivalry’, while the auto sacramantales of Calderón served as a counterpart to Parsifal, reversing its path from art to religion.

By sheer transgression, Roberto Bolano remapped the Latin American literary canon. Through novels, stories, essays, poems, and interviews, he did it by establishing a dialogue – often rapturous, seldom terse – with the major figures of 20th-century literature. Borges was his center of gravity. He admired Nicanor Parra and Cesar Vallejo. He found Isabel Allende kitschy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a merchant of stereotypes and Mario Vargas Llosa, while obviously talented, was in his eyes too professional. He ridiculed Diamela Eltit and plotted to kidnap Octavio Paz. Beyond his affinities, though, Bolano’s oeuvre reads like a who’s who of the continent’s literati. He wasn’t afraid to use fiction to do criticism and vice versa. His spontaneity is a lesson against academic posturing and lazy thinking.

This chapter examines two Latin American festivals accounts, in which prominent Cervantine figures make their first American appearances. It contends that these accounts are paradigmatic examples of transition in colonial texts in at least two ways. First, they are examples of “theoretical transition” between marginal and canonical that produce new texts defined by their generic hybridity. Second, they offer thematic transitions, as the prominent Cervantine figures travel from Spain to the Americas as characters of a print book, they were then enacted in public performances in New Spain and Peru to be recorded in written accounts. In these texts, the prominent Cervantine figures meet Spanish American characters and places in viceregal festivals.

This chapter approaches the roman-nouvelle distinction by treating these artifacts as Wittgensteinian “families”: what makes a roman a roman (or a nouvelle a nouvelle) is not one particular shared feature but a pattern of overlapping similarities. Using the criteria of length, linearity, and truth posture to establish a series of different scenarios for determining what might be considered a roman (or a nouvelle), the transition between the two forms can be clearly mapped. Against the commonplaces of traditional French literary history, it reveals that the roman was in decline before the arrival of the nouvelle. It also shows that the roman was in no way a traditional or archaic form, but one with its own relatively short history.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flaneur – a figure who mingles with crowds and street scenes but also observes and documents the sights from a distance – captures well the early life of John Kennedy Toole and the character of Ignatius Reilly at the center of his famous novel. Ignatius is modeled upon a colleague of Toole’s at a small college in Lafayette, Louisiana, a scholar of Medieval culture and history who came from New Orleans. It also traces the novel’s publication history and extraordinary success in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as the tragic end to young novelist’s life by suicide.