Overview

The fox is cunning, the lion is brave. These familiar ideas span back to the medieval bestiary – short, animal-centred texts, often illustrated, used to disseminate Christian teachings in medieval society. Translated into dozens of languages, bestiaries were wildly popular until the twelfth century. After centuries of obscurity, six of Latin America’s most prominent writers – Juan José Arreola, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicolás Guillén, Augusto Monterroso, Pablo Neruda, and José Emilio Pacheco – took up the bestiary during the experimental Latin American avant-garde and Boom periods. From Griffin to Axolotl presents the bestiary as a distinct genre within Hispanic literature, examining its resurgence in the contemporary canon. Analyzing a corpus of over eighty bestiaries collected through field research in Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, Ailén Cruz explores the evolutions of the genre. Reimagined through both prose and art, and moving beyond religious teachings, these bestiaries range from the rebellious to the nonsensical, touching on a spectrum of topics – from preservation of Indigenous Latin American cultures to environmental crises and the human condition. From Griffin to Axolotl promotes an understudied genre of Hispanic literature, demonstrating that the bestiary is not extinct, but has been remoulded for modern society.

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9780228026310

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Reviews

""Ailén Cruz has done a phenomenal job of linking the resurgence of the bestiary genre to contemporary Hispanic literature. From Griffin to Axolotl is in a category by itself."" - Odile Cisneros, University of Alberta ""Beautifully illustrated, this book provides an illuminating study of bestiaries in the Hispanic tradition."" - Adam Sharman, University of Nottingham

Author Information

Ailén Cruz is a post-doctoral researcher at Mount Allison University and writes the bilingual Substack Prone to Hyperbole.

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