Á. Valbuena Prat’s Historia de la literatura step-by-step (III): review and decline of a work "more human than scholarly"

Abstract

The unedited correspondence exchanged between G. Gili i Roig and Á. Valbuena Prat allows us to discover important details about the genesis and th intricate editing process of the innovative Historia de la literatura española, originally published in 1937. This submission (the third one of five) analyzes in detail the material conditions of each reviewed and expanded edition. Also, it examines the suspicious combination of urgency, promises and excuses that were produced in each re-edition in order to derive in a single Historia that lead to a weak and disenchanted reflection of a brilliant project that it began to be.