Neruda’s poetry and political activism have been naturally inscribed in the geopolitical and hermeneutical framework of the Cold War, the struggle between capitalism and communism, and the national liberation processes of the Global South. His international recognition coincides with his political radicalization: from his exile at the end of 1940 to his presidential candidacy in 1969, promoted by the Communist Party of Chile. His poetry, on the other hand, from Residencia en la tierra and El canto general, and to his later Incitación al Nixonicidio y alabanza de la Revolución Cubana, can be understood as an expression of partisan literature. It is clear that Neruda is not only a well-known writer, but also an important witness of the twentieth century. In this context, this chapter begins with the question: Is a new reading of Neruda possible, a reading beyond the historical framework that has informed his usual reception?

This introductory chapter examines the life, oeuvre, and contested legacy of Pablo Neruda against the backdrop of contemporary debates about cultural memory, ethics, and artistic value. Beginning with recent episodes of public denunciation in Chile, it situates Neruda within a broader dilemma: how to read and evaluate the work of canonical authors whose biographies reveal profound moral failures. The introduction traces Neruda’s evolution as a poet, diplomat, and political actor, highlighting the breadth of his literary production, from love poetry and avant-garde experimentation to epic, politically engaged verse and elemental odes. Rather than offering hagiography or cancellation, it argues for a contextualized reading that recognizes both the gravity of Neruda’s transgressions and the enduring influence of his work on world literature, politics, and cultural imagination. It frames the volume as a collective effort to read Neruda critically, historically, and globally.

Pablo Neruda lived in the crossroads of the cultural Cold War and its influence in Latin America. At once an ardent defender of the Soviet Union and the policies dictated from the Politburo, but also falling prey to the tensions that those directions generated in Latin America, the Chilean poet made the attempt (and ultimately failed to bring it to completion) to reconcile his views on democracy with the more radical members of Salvador Allende’s government. After the coup, amid the raids against all members of the political left, Neruda became a thorn in the side of the junta, and a potential menace that needed to be neutralized. The ensuing controversy regarding the judicial process to find the real cause of his death, not complete in its totality as of yet, contextualizes the rest of this essay.

The Introduction presents the topic of feminine imagery for the Church and the book’s method for examining this imagery in both expository and literary sources and across the traditional medieval and early modern periodization divide. It presents Lady Church both as a theological person with a transcendent ontological status not identical to the ecclesiastical institution and as a literary figure developed through drama, poetry, and literary techniques used in other genres.

1927 was a critical period in Pablo Neruda’s life. At the time, he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Rangoon. He was a promising poet and a young diplomat hungry to see the world. Southeast Asia represented a season of solitude that he alleviated with his marriage to Maruca, with whom he would have his only daughter. The girl would die at an early age. In this region, he envisaged Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1933). Through the letters to his friend Héctor Eandi and his travel chronicles, we learn the inner landscapes that occupied Neruda’s creative mind. A memorable poem written in this period is “El tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), which describes his tempestuous relationship with Josie Bliss. This period has been revisited lately due to the confession of a sexual assault of a young Tamil woman under his service expressed in his memoirs.

In 1943, on his way back to Chile, after having finished his stint as Consul General to Mexico, Pablo Neruda stopped in Peru and visited Machu Picchu. While written before he became a card-carrying member of the Party, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) can be read not only as expressing his reactions to the physical beauty of the place, but also as depicting in poetic terms his evolution from the vanguardista of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935) to a politically engaged writer. However, in addition to reflecting this political conversion, one can see in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” a successful attempt at writing a left-wing poetry that builds on the achievements of the vanguardia and avoids the dogmatic pitfalls of the then mandatory socialist realism.

This essay gathers the political, literary, and historical significance of India in the poems, memoirs, and articles of Pablo Neruda. It shows that the poet’s career in the subcontinent exceeded and rejected a mystifying Indophilia. Instead, the internationalist framework of Neruda’s two sojourns in India (1927–28 and 1950) corresponds to two major phases of his political thought: decolonization and the anti-imperialist peace movement. Neruda’s refusal of Indophilia brought him closer to Indian writers of English, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, and Kannada and to Indian visual artists. “The Grapes of History” (“Las uvas de la historia”), an image from his long poem on India from 1951, has fructified and fermented in the reflections and translations of Nerudiana among major writers (Ali Sardar Jafri, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Kunwar Narain, and Arundhati Roy) and artists (Chittaprosad Bhattacharya and Vivan Sundaram) long after the poet’s passing, well into the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s participation in a translation program implemented in Romania during the Cold War years. In the 1950s and 1960s, Neruda established a literary-political connection with the Writers’ Union and accepted the invitation to translate the anthology 44 poetas rumanos (1967). His translations relied on French translations, as he did not know Romanian. With 44 poetas, both unknown poets and known poets, such as Hélène Vacaresco, Benjamin Fondane, and Ilarie Voronca, were read in Spanish for the first time. The collective nature of the project led to the exclusion of 44 poetas from Nerudiana dispersa II (2002). Through an examination of translations, letters, memoirs, and archival material, this chapter argues that the inclusion of 44 poetas in Neruda’s complete works would contribute to a nuanced exploration of his view on translation and his role as an agent of international literary transfer.

There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.

Widely considered to be a quintessential avant-gardist work, Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth, 1925–35) also emerges from historical, political, and personal events that inform and act as reference points throughout the book. Contrary to prevailing interpretations of this classic book of poetry, his battle with poetic language and vanguardist aesthetic stances coexists with a realist aesthetic that highlights the sociohistorical and individual circumstances in which he is immersed. Written mostly overseas, where he served as low-level consul, the combination of the avant-gardist techniques depicts the poetic subject’s alienation from nature and society. Neruda represents the speaker as using a hermetic poetic language as a way of divulging his own estrangement. He begins to overcome this stage thanks to his relationships with women, his increasing political awareness, and his use of nature as positive force in his poetry and life.

Pablo Neruda served as Consul General in Mexico from 1940 to 1943. This was a foundational period on his path toward becoming Latin America’s politically engaged poet par excellence, when his verse and public persona fused around a sharpened commitment to the working class and the struggles against fascism and imperialism. As a haven for left-wing exiles, Mexico City during World War II was a “key node” in global cultural Cold War debates about “the relationship between the intellectual to revolution,” according to Patrick Iber. Neruda found common cause with Mexico’s ideologically engaged muralists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros, and feuded with the more artistically independent poets, principally Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize, 1990). Years later, during an odyssey of political exile from his native Chile, Neruda returned to Mexico. There, in 1950, he published his magnum opus, Canto general, a sweeping epic about Latin America’s revolutionary historical destiny, considered the literary equivalent of Mexican muralism.

Chapter 5 identifies how partisan figures in fourteenth-century England, such as John Wyclif and Roger Dymmok, sharpened feminine imagery for the Church, especially in debates over the legitimacy of ecclesiastical wealth. In his Trialogus, Wyclif presents Lady Church as a damsel in distress who was assaulted by the Donation of Constantine, while Dymmok in his anti-Lollard treatise presents Lollards as matricidal vipers and the endowed Church as a mother whose uterus and breasts nurture her educated clergy.

This chapter addresses Pablo Neruda’s poetry as world literature. It discusses the prominence that models such as Franco Moretti’s assign to the novel and to Paris or other Western capitals as centers of canonization. It examines the circulation of Neruda’s poetry in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in the late 1940s and early 1950s to conclude that it is inaccurate to claim that Latin American literature did not enter the international market until the 1960s when the novel received attention in the West. The conclusions argue that a study of the international circulation of literature that is not politically biased or Eurocentric requires an analysis of the translation and publication itineraries of poetry and beyond Europe and the Anglophone market.

This essay focuses on Elicura Chihuailaf’s 1996 bilingual Mapuzugun/Spanish anthology of Neruda’s work. The translation and selection in the anthology titled Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul reveal a creative and ambitious rereading of Neruda’s virtues and flaws in understanding the Mapuche world. A close reading of Chihuailaf’s Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul shows how Neruda’s poetry can be reinterpreted in ways that allow for the presence of Mapuche voice and ethos. Chihuailaf’s rereading of Neruda’s work expands and redefines the idea of the “National Poet” in the twenty-first-century Chilean context.

Philosophical and conceptual understandings of time underpin Bowen’s writing, and often these are expressed through experiments with form and narrative. Focusing on Bowen’s novels, this chapter examines how her characters are shown in scalar relation to bigger historical moments or developments, even while the writer holds on to the primacy and singularity of individual experience. It discusses the relationship between history and affect or individual feeling through three interrelated narrative tropes: the temporality of loss, typically broached through themes of adolescence and innocence lost; textual time, or the ‘multitemporal’ qualities of words and letters; and time capsules, or the irruption of the past into the present or future, particularly as a felt experience of wartime. Reading Bowen in context not only emphasises the important issues of her time; it also illuminates the reader’s relationship to her time, and how one might feel and understand intimate attachments to the world in contemporary times.

In Bowen’s fiction, domestic architecture shapes the character and modus vivendi of those it houses. While Bowen admired the austerity of eighteenth-century architecture, exemplified in Bowen’s Court, her family’s Big House in County Cork, she admitted to a preference for the fanciful villas of the Kentish seaside where she lived as a child with her beloved mother. This chapter examines her ambivalence about the architectural styles that supplanted the august simplicity of Georgian design. Ambivalent, too, is her attitude to the housing estates that pullulated in the English suburbs. Although she deplores the desecration of tradition, she is also exhilarated by the ferment of modernisation. The chapter concludes with Bowen’s haunted houses, which engender their own inhabitants, whether living or undead.