Animal Symbolism in Hispanic Literature

Whether unicorns, phoenix, and chimera, or axolotl, jaguars, and giant snakes, animals have often had the human experience grafted onto them, in a conscious or unconscious reflection of a society's beliefs, ambitions, and inequalities.


This volume seeks to explore different representations of real and imaginary animals across Hispanic literary production from the early modern era to the present day in order to gain a better understanding of how they serve as projections of human identities, knowledge, values, and vices. How do beasts enable the colonizing gaze and its reaches? How might beasts offer a means of decolonizing the Hispanophone world? And how do beasts articulate social unrest and a desire to resist inequality, poverty, and other ills of the modern world that collectively reinforce the status quo?

Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors, illustrators, and graphic artists have understood animals and beasts, and how they interacted with them, contributors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Spain shed light on the use of animals as symbols and emblems, as well as how they have been employed to construct others as monstrous and less human.

LAUREN BECK holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture at Mount Allison University.

AILÉN CRUZ writes the bilingual Substack Prone to Hyperbole and is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture at Mount Allison University.

Samantha Penina Ruckenstein is Lecturer of Visual and Material Culture Studies at Mount Allison University as well as an Assistant Professor of Spanish through St. Thomas University's Aotiitj Program on Elsipogtog First Nation.

CONTRIBUTORS: Lauren Beck, Tania Bride, Elena Campero, Odile Cisneros, Adrián Collado Icardo, Ailén Cruz, Alba Devo-Colis, Penélope Marcela Fernández Izaguirre, Irene López-Rodríguez, Alejandro Ramírez-Méndez, Samantha Penina Ruckenstein, Alejandro Soifer