This chapter illuminates the diverse, emergent views of reading, writing, and the literary that unfolded in Cuban journalism, a key player in nineteenth-century print culture. Drawing on both ephemeral and longer-lived newspapers and magazines, the chapter unpacks questions of normative practices, cultural tastes, linguistic correction, and the tensions among the informational, didactic, and entertainment functions of the printed word and with the literary-artistic value implicit in the notions of the “highbrow,” all of which were raised by the democratization of print culture’s outreach to anybody who could read or find someone to read to them. An analysis of the shifting meanings of the words periodismo [journalism] and lo literario [the literary] anchors these questions, in a chapter that also contextualizes journalism’s rise within pressing social issues and questions about access to literary culture by focusing further on journalism’s role as a forum for writing by free men and women of color, by a few enslaved individuals, and by white women.

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

While the connections between commonplace books, miscellanies, and essays have long been recognised, and the significance of the commonplace methodology for early essayists noted, we still lack a comprehensive account of the genres’ enmeshing. Drawing on the work of prominent early essayists (Michel de Montaigne, John Florio, William Cornwallis), as well as the collections of Joshua Baildon and Francis Osborne, this chapter fills that gap. It shows how the commonplace method helped to generate the early essay by providing essayists with their raw materials, and also demonstrates how commonplace books and miscellanies modelled the practices of notation, citation, and imitation that made the form possible. Early essays were made from citations, but they also transformed those citations. Thus, early essays were grounded in both the humanist imitative tradition, from which the culture of commonplacing emerged, and a longer tradition of miscellaneous writing, reaching back to late antiquity.

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

This chapter surveys the contingencies and forces of influence between the two prose genres ofearly modern sermons and essays. With reference to the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, it argues that essayists who turned to printed sermons for inspiration found in them unique modes of rhetorical self-fashioning. Sermons bring to the fore questions of style that reveal how learned preachers attempted to construct a sacred authorial persona, whose aim was not just to convey the force of an idea, but frequently to evoke its experiential consequences in the pursuit of a religious life. It also considers how the Montaignian essay form offered itself as a model for preachers seeking to perfect, or essay, their voice in preparation for their religious vocation as divine mediators.

This chapter considers the role of the essay in debates over the ‘rise of English’ in the nineteenth century. It firstly explores the crossover between academia and publishing, focusing on David Masson and George Saintsbury, whose well-regarded literary essays led to professorial appointments at London and Edinburgh. It then considers how University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins turned to periodical essays to garner support for the introduction of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. Collins’s diatribes argued that the literary essay itself was at risk of extinction if journalists and critics continued to be deprived of professional training. Finally, this chapter considers the inclusion of essayists on English literature syllabuses during the fin de siècle. Figures such as Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt, and John Dryden, along with later writers including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Charles Lamb were prominently featured, suggesting that essayists were regarded as the sine qua non of literary study at that time.

In a detailed analysis of selections from Dulce María Loynaz’s poetry and nonfiction prose, and her radically experimental avant-garde novel Jardín (1951), this chapter demonstrates that this 1992 winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize, who wrote much of her important work in the interwar years but maintained during her long life an ear attuned to changing times and shifting literary styles, consistently resisted classification in any category other than, perhaps, the paradoxical. The essay highlights throughout the “mixed signals” that emerge from the work of a formidable literary figure who was simultaneously romantic and modern, avant-garde and critical of the avant-gardes, intimist and anchored in the historical context.

This chapter addresses the literary-artistic worlds marking the work of Cuban fiction writer, journalist, and film critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante, demonstrating first that the stories of cultural publications in the 1950s, like the longstanding Bohemia and Carteles, and of the new postrevolutionary initiative of the early 1960s, Lunes de Revolución, cannot be understood without tracing the key role Cabrera Infante played in them during these years. But, as the chapter details, Cabrera Infante’s own masterpieces, Tres tristes tigres (1967) and Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974), are also more fully illuminated by pursuing such connections. In making these links, the chapter proposes that the convergences in Cabrera Infante’s journalism, cinema criticism, and fiction created a “poetics of the fragment” that embodied a privileging of ambiguity over didacticism in art.

This chapter examines what critics have often called the “boom” of women’s literary writing that emerged beginning in the 1990s, providing detailed analyses of challenges to the patriarchy and to “state machismo” that, the chapter argues, are enacted by seven paradigmatic women writers of the period: Mylene Fernández Pintado, Mariela Varona, Anna Lidia Vega Serova, Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks, Mildre Hernández, Yordanka Almaguer, and Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas. Key to the emergence of these writers, who stand in for numerous other women who began publishing after 1989, the chapter argues, was the groundbreaking appearance in 1996 of the story anthology Estatuas de sal: Cuentistas cubanas contemporáneas: Panorama crítico (1959–1995), edited by Mirta Yáñez and Marilyn Bobes, the first island-published anthology featuring only women authors and women living in exile. The anthology’s characters and situations generated a new national and transnational discourse, the chapter posits, and were reproduced rhizome-like in the following decades through hundreds of stories and novels written by the authors it included and others.

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.