This chapter focuses on the poetry, fiction, and essays of José Lezama Lima, the Grupo Orígenes he cofounded, and its literary journal of the same name, noting their reverberations far into the postrevolutionary era. The chapter encompasses the work and poetics of Lezama, other poets in the Orígenes orbit, and the group’s journals, including their high-modernist esthetic and internationalist reach; Lezama’s view of poetry’s “epistemic role in Western and non-Western cosmologies” and “innate resistance to causal and empiricist visions of time and progress” and the group’s incursions into myth and cosmogony; the canonical or cult status later achieved by many Orígenes poets; and the critical ostracism and resuscitations Lezama and Orígenes experienced in Cuba’s postrevolutionary periods. Lezama’s 1957 essay La expresión américana is central to an in-depth analysis of the Orígenes group’s “grand mosaic of hemispheric and transatlantic creation”; Lezama’s intricate conception of a New World Baroque; and the essay’s projection, as in other writing by Lezama, of a distinctively Caribbean Baroque, even as specific Antillean referents remain unnamed.

This chapter addresses the “lost” epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) by Silvestre de Balboa, which was rediscovered in 1836 and has, since then, been considered the first work of Cuban literature, a status that has also been contested. The poem narrates the 1604 kidnapping and freeing of a Spanish prelate, then Bishop of Cuba, by French pirates. The chapter first examines the poem’s archival history, the nineteenth-century debates about slavery and race that framed the poem’s consideration as a foundational work, and the debates into the twenty-first century contributing to the as-yet-unresolved question of its foundational status. The chapter then details Balboa’s imaginative recasting of European Renaissance conventions of the epic genre, in a version distinct to the Americas and with new epistemological consequences in the treatment of Cuban nature and in the literary creation of a distinct local territory of inhabitants, marked by a poetics of community and loaded with cultural heterogeneity.

This chapter complicates Cuba’s contributions to Spanish American modernismo, interweaving close readings of the poetry of Julián del Casal and others in his circle with larger polemics about Cuban poetry that have marked Casal’s critical reception in Cuba into the twenty-first century. Casal, characterized in the chapter as an enduring mystery, a provocateur, and a dissident, wrote journalistic crónicas, as did José Martí. But Casal’s work embraced the more inward-turning estheticist and decadentist modernista tropes drawn from French Parnassianism, which has led to what the chapter portrays as the protracted debate about Casal and Martí as opposites, an overdrawn contrast in this chapter’s view, ranging from attacks on Casal as “exotic” or “Frenchified” to his recasting as an “autonomous agent” who rebelled against literary norms. If Martí rebelled on behalf of others, the chapter affirms, Casal rebelled to free himself, even if it meant denying his body certain desires and habits, an observation pointing to critical initiatives to contextualize Casal as a gay writer, which the essay also examines.

This chapter explores approaches to the theme of diaspora in twenty-first-century Cuban film, demonstrating how archipelagic thinking can help elucidate the transnational connections, translations, and collaborations constituting Cuban cinema and that entail a difficult reckoning with geographical or temporal limits for structuring the analysis of literary-cultural production. The chapter dissects this landscape using four categories – outgoing journeys, returning diasporas, on-island films about migration, and representations of exile from inside Cuba – in an analysis of Juan Pablo Daranas’s Ángela (2018), Sebastián and Rodrigo Barriuso’s 2018 Un traductor [A Translator], Armando Capó’s Agosto (2019), and José Luis Aparicio’s 2021 Sueños al pairo [Dreams Adrift].

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

This chapter unpacks the category “Cuban America” in order to examine Cuban fiction and nonfiction prose in the US by a rich ensemble of writers whose work elucidates how deterritorialization makes deciphering questions of belonging through literary categories challenging. Whereas Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s literature and criticism popularized the notion of hyphenated identities beginning in the 1990s, this chapter conveys a plethora of issues around Cuban Americanness for a rich and diverse ensemble of writers who, having arrived in the US in different eras, may write in English, Spanish, or a mix of the two, and whose relationship to their country of origin – Cuba or the US – is complicated. The chapter organizes these writers into four groupings: writers linked to the first postrevolutionary wave of exiles, who, it is argued, keep acculturation at arm’s length; writers whose exile was propelled by or contemporaneous with the 1980 Mariel exodus; second-generation Cuban US writers producing work primarily in English and pointing toward a Cuban US Latinidad; and Cuban writers who migrated to the US in the post-Soviet era.

Anchored in rich archival material, this chapter explores the diverse performance centers; dramatic genres; and key writers, actors, metamorphosing stock characters, and forms of humor that marked theater in Cuba’s long nineteenth century. Drawing on the growing diversity of Havana audiences for theatrical entertainment, interwoven with the stereotypes of ethnicity, race, and social class that often peppered theatrical genres, the chapter frames its detailed examples within the larger questions posed by a literary history, including whose theater history should be told and, in the context of the widely located political, economic, and commercial forces marking the island’s history, to which geographies and colonial or national temporalities its nineteenth-century theater history should belong.

This chapter addresses key currents in Cuban poetry, on and off the island, from 1989 to 2020, a body of work rich in experimentalism and in dialogue with the coloquialista [conversationalist] poetics that characterized earlier postrevolutionary poetry. Synthesizing the work of numerous poets, the chapter demonstrates that, with the disillusionment that accompanied the disintegration of the Socialist Bloc, poets such as Marilyn Bobes, Soleida Ríos, and the influential and award-winning Reina María Rodríguez were at the forefront of antiheroic representations and of reinvigorating philosophical thought through their lyrical work. The chapter also explores the embrace of detotalization, deterritorialization, intertextuality, and hybridity, contributing to forms of radical rupture in the poetry of Juan Carlos Flores, Omar Pérez, and Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, as well as the postmodern strategies, reflections on the act of writing, and new identitarian sites found in the work of Caridad Atencio and the group of seven Black poets/creators calling themselves “El Palenque.”

This chapter examines the origins and style of the early English essay, in order to consider the peculiarities of the form. The first section discusses the vexed origins of the English essay, which arrived on the literary scene both as an innovation, and as a continuation of older forms of moral discourse. It argues that essays were characterised by a paradoxical relationship to temporality, affecting both how the form began, and its style, in representing thought and thinking. Examining the style of essays by Francis Bacon, William Cornwallis, Nicholas Breton, Owen Felltham, and John Hall, the chapter uncovers a tension between flow and stasis, evident in punctuation and the structure of sentences. Rather than taking this to signal two distinct styles of the early English essay, associated respectively with Montaigne and Bacon, the chapter argues that it is the tension that is characteristic, oscillating between the representation of deliberation and decision.

This chapter surveys the economic, cultural, and political factors that transformed the Cuban audiovisual landscape beginning in 1989, elucidating the multiple challenges tackled by filmmakers: material shortages, intermittent censorship, and a sometimes tense relationship with the official Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). The chapter demonstrates that, in this richly inventive period, films of all length and genres, drawing on multiple media and replete with Cuban versions of manga, gangsters, and zombies, not only questioned what constitutes state-sponsored, independent, national, or transnational filmmaking, but also carried out a revision of Cuban history into contemporary everyday life. Key factors illuminated include the mentoring role assumed by seasoned director Fernando Pérez; the emergence of women filmmakers for the first time since director Sara Gómez (1942–1974); the entrepreneurial deployment of new technologies; the hybridity of local, international, official, and nonofficial funding sources; the diversification of constituencies and locales represented; and the critical importance of ICAIC’s annual Muestra Joven, or Festival of Young Cuban Filmmakers.

With an understanding of ‘bibliography’ in its original sense of writing about books, this chapter provides a genealogy of the British bibliographical essay, commencing with the medieval bibliophile Richard de Bury. It traces the development of that species of essay through the eighteenth century, when essays started widely appearing in broadsides, newspapers, and magazines as well as books, motivating essayists to reflect upon the material form in which they were publishing. Following the periodical essayists’ critique of commercial print culture, Romantic essayists like Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey turned their attention to old books, emphasising their tangible, material value, while at the same time upholding literature’s immaterial qualities. In the age of bibliomania, antiquarian books became an opportunity for the bibliographical essay to come into its own among an expanding audience of bibliophiles and collectors.

This epilogue chapter draws on metaphors of opera to offer a layered meditation on recurrent themes, teleologies, and tropes of identity, exceptionalism, and authenticity – stated, reworked, subverted, abandoned, and resurrected in Cuban literary culture from the end of the nineteenth century into the third decade of the twenty-first. Revisiting such figures as José Martí, Julián del Casal, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, Lorenzo García Vega, Virgilio Piñera, Reinaldo Arenas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Antonio José Ponte, among others, and noting the writing of numerous literary women and men of different postrevolutionary generations who echo, mythologize, undermine, or shift directions from these legacies, the chapter asks that readers of Cuba’s cumulative literary history attune themselves to the performative voices through which this operatic literary history unfolds.

Across centuries and continents, the Irish essay has captured impressions and insights triggered by socio-political transformations across the island, and the form’s malleability has allowed writers to puzzle out the contours of Irish identity, often highlighting its deliberate performativity. Shaped by the culture’s oral tradition, the Irish essay frequently imbricates with storytelling, theatrical performance, and public lectures, live events that underscore its performative qualities. Writers often gear their impressions and inquiries self-consciously to audiences real and imagined, assuming the essay plays a meaningful role in public dialogue. In the twenty-first century, personal and lyric essays focused on rapidly changing perceptions of bodies and sexuality exemplify this trait. This alertness to performance and audiences helps to explain the Irish essay’s ready adaptation to new forms, technologies, and platforms in pursuit of readers, listeners, and viewers at home and abroad.

This chapter examines alternative cultural projects that emerged in Cuba from the 1980s into the new millennium: intellectual groupings, periodicals, and writing initiatives neither fully in the state’s purview nor fully outside of it. The chapter elucidates the national and international factors as well as intellectual and artistic goals marking such projects as Paideia (1989–1990), Diáspora(s) (1993–c.2002), Torre de Letras (2001–2016), OMNI Zona Franca (1995–?), and la noria (2009–) and notes their impact on the writers of Generation Zero, born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who published some of their work in these venues. Although the chapter includes numerous writers, key figures addressed include Rolando Prats (Paideia); Reina María Rodríguez (Paideia and Torre de Letras); Rolando Sánchez Mejías, Carlos A. Aguilera, Ricardo Alberto Pérez, Pedro Marqués de Armas, and Rogelio Saunders (Diásporas); Juan Carlos Flores, Amaury Pacheco, David Escalona, Luis Eligio Pérez, Alina Guzmán, Nilo Julián González, Damián Valdés, and Jorge (Yoyi) Pérez (OMNI Zona Franca); and Oscar Cruz and José Ramón Sánchez (la noria).