What is it about?
This article analyzes Joaquín Arderíus’s Los príncipes iguales (1928), an avant-garde novel which anticipates the politicization of Spanish letters in the 1930s. Examining this fairy tale through Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World reveals carnivalesque techniques that the author uses to subvert the fairy tale genre and overturn social, political, and literary hierarchies. The novel’s esperpentic vision is in concert with Modernism, exhibiting futurist, surrealist, and expressionist tendencies.
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Why is it important?
This novel demonstrates the diversity of the avant-garde novel, which encompassed not only art for art's sake, but also social art, much of which was suppressed during the Franco dictatorship. In this way, it recuperates a neglected area of Spain's rich literary tradition. At the same time, it demonstrates traits consistent with much of Spanish Modernism, including aesthetic tendencies common to a variety of European variants of the movement.
Perspectives
This article highlights Arderíus's humor and wit, which some of his later, more serious works lack. Two interesting aspects of this article are the examination of pseudo vampirism and the play on homosexuality and inbreeding, which are employed in order to discredit an effete, decaying aristocracy.
Dr Lynn Chloia Purkey
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Disarming Prince Charming: Los príncipes iguales as Subversive Fairy Tale, January 2016, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004310186_014.
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