Overview

Exploring how Reinaldo Arenas reimagined literary classics as queer, subversive parodies that undermine oppressive power This book offers a fresh reading of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, showing how the Cuban writer reimagined literary and visual classics as parodies that challenge oppressive power structures. Incorporating his own life experiences, Arenas transformed canonical figures, genres, and narratives into carnivalesque intertexts that dismantle dominant ideologies. By queering Cuba’s past and present, this book shows, Arenas’s works offer a creative blueprint for resistance. Angela Willis demonstrates how Arenas drew heavily on established sources—repurposing early texts on the Spanish Inquisition, mimicking novels set on colonial Cuban plantations by José Lezama Lima and Cirilo Villaverde, and engaging with visual works such as Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Taking a comparativist, intertextual approach, this book offers new ways to explore the texts Arenas parodies. It also discusses two overlooked pieces by Arenas—an unfinished film script of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso and a key essay on “avant-garde” narrative—along with the original manuscript and audio tapes linked to the writer’s autobiography, Antes que anochezca (Before Night Falls). The close readings and little-known archival materials in this book provide new insights into Arenas’s artistic dissidence.

Full Product Details

Author:   Angela L. Willis
Publisher:   University Press of Florida
Imprint:   University Press of Florida
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 22.90cm
ISBN:  

9781683406242

ISBN 10:   1683406249
Pages:   294
Publication Date:   26 May 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Note on Translations Introduction. A Dissident’s Manifesto of Survival: Parody and Intertextual Images of the Self 1. An Agonista’s Life Story / Storied Life 2. Parodic Readings of the Archive as Neobaroque Picaresque Revelations: El mundo alucinante 3. Carnivalesque Destruction of the Plantation: La Loma del Angel and an Incomplete Filmic Vision of Paradiso 4. Drawing Dangerous Desire: Intertextual (Self-)Portraits in “Mona” and The Garden of Earthly Delights 5. Unveiling and Unraveling “Un escándalo póstumo”: An Intratextual Reading of the Antes que anochezca Manuscript Conclusion. Looking Back: Rewriting Reinaldo Arenas into the Future Notes Bibliography Index

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Author Information

Angela L. Willis, professor of Hispanic studies and Latin American studies and assistant dean of educational policy at Davidson College, is coauthor of The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum.

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