Introduction Animal Symbolism in Hispanic Literature: From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day

This is a book about the way writers contributing to the Hispanic literary tradition have turned animals into symbols over the past 600 years, a period that widely spans the modern age. It explores how writers under different circumstances and of disparate backgrounds imagine the human experience through animals, real or imagined. Beneath the fur and scales lie the etchings of human knowledge, experiences, values, and vices. These creatures have adapted and evolved to suit different literary genres over the centuries. They appear in codices, explorers’ diaries, manuscripts, novels, artwork, theater, and film, always making their presence visible along with the preoccupations of their authors. Working to better understand how Spanish and Latin American authors and artists have understood and interacted with animals and beasts, this volume sheds light on the use of animals as symbols, emblems, and projections, as well as their role in constructing others as less human and monstrous. Laden with symbolism, the creatures crawling over the pages of this volume embody the most influential social and cultural issues facing us in the modern age, from the impacts of colonialism, Indigeneity, and social unrest, to the climate crisis, human rights, and capitalism.

This is the first book to address how mythical and real animals came to embody Hispanophone culture and pivotal moments of its past, especially colonialism and its aftermath, on both sides of the Atlantic. Most works that address animals do so with the historian in mind, and important pieces of the puzzle – the literary and visual iteration of the animalian world – are overlooked. It has been more than a quarter century since a book-length work concerning real and fantastic beasts in literature and visual culture relating marginally to Latin America was published: James Arnold’s Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities (1996). Other works, including Miguel de Asúa and Roger French’s A New World of Animals: Early Modern Europeans on the Creatures of Iberian America (2005), Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici’s Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013), and Scott DeVries’s Creature Discomfort: Fauna-Criticism, Ethics, and the Representation of Animals in Spanish American Fiction and Poetry (2016) have bypassed the mythical and fantastic and focused solely on the real. Abel Alves addresses rhetorical uses of animals and their impacts during a one-way, westward transatlantic exchange in The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and Human Interaction with Other Animals, 1492–1826 (2011). And the roles that Latin American animals played as spectacles in early modern Spain have only recently been examined by John Beusterien in Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain (2020). Until the present volume, no work has addressed both real and fantastic animals as symbolic of the preoccupations gripping Spain and Latin American from the fifteenth century to today. This book is the first to analyze the reciprocal relationship between animals and authors, exploring the influence beasts exert over culture, and vice versa.

Six hundred years encompass deep and wide-reaching epochal change that characterizes modernity: the Hispanophone world’s expansion into Africa and later the Americas in the fifteenth century; the merging of the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire in 1516; the establishment of several colonies in the European scramble for non-European lands over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; the impacts that Bourbon reforms had in refashioning the Spanish colonies as nascent nation-states; the independence movements that spread across the Hispanophone region, with Cuba and the Philippines gaining their independence in 1898 and Equatorial New Guinea – Spain’s last colony – in 1968; the struggle for stable governance that characterizes the entire Hispanophone world in the wake of decolonization; and in the case of Spain, its movement toward a constitutional monarchy and its four-decade dictatorship in the mid-twentieth century.

Animals in this 600-year period increasingly contribute to the project of decentering humans. As Maryanne Leone and Shanna Lino establish, early modern Spain’s fascination with environmental culture contends with the rise of capitalism and extractionism throughout the colonial era. This slow evolution over the centuries matured into an awareness of the animalian and natural worlds and our dependence on them in the twentieth and twenty-first century (Leone and Lino 2023). Ecocriticism, the resurgence of Indigenous epistemology, and the act of decentering the human thus become important tools through which Hispanophone society may fight the climate crisis. This ethos is also challenged by the way animalian lives are considered sacrificial compared to others, a phenomenon explored by Katarzyna Olga Beilen in her analysis of recent discourse about bullfighting and related forms of biopolitics (Beilen 2015).

World-changing epistemologies predicated upon capitalism and climate change collectively shape the Hispanophone world on a global stage. As a means of introducing this book’s chapters, we provide an overview of the three ages that exhibit certain trends in how animalia is iterated in literary form: the early modern period, the twentieth century, and the twenty-first century. These inform how this book is structured and account for the shifting cultural and sociological boundaries of the Spanish-speaking world through the three key phases in its modern development.