This volume is one of few surveys in English of the whole of Lorca’s poetry and the first to concentrate entirely on self-consciousness, a subject which it sees as central to our understanding of the work of a poet writing in the most self-conscious of literary periods: the Modernist era. Focusing on poems which have the poet, art and creativity as their subject, or which draw attention at a formal level to issues of practice or style, it shows how these poems speak for or against contemporary aesthetic doctrine, thereby revealing the extent of the poet’s allegiance to it and the positions he takes up in the process of making his own mark in the literary field. In so doing it charts the development of a poet whose self-conscious engagement with his art offers an explanation as to why his work, in the space of little more than a decade and a half, should have been so singular and diverse. FEDERICO BONADDIO lectures in Modern Spanish Studies at King’s College London.
