ABSTRACT
Chapter One outlines the genesis and evolution of gay and queer literary criticism in Spanish studies as prompted by controversies over homosexuality in the work of Federico García Lorca. It also explains the methodological tools developed by Anglo-American queer studies scholars and by Spanish gay and queer literary critics. The central notions discussed in this part include homographesis, which was proposed by Lee Edelman, and the metaphor of a scribe, which was forged by Alfredo Martínez Expósito to depict Spanish gay writers from the 1970s and 1980s, who, as Expósito argues, rushed to produce a plethora of homoerotic texts in order to revive the ruptured gay literary tradition in Spain. Being naïve ‘copies,’ their books fall short as works of art since their aesthetic quality is mediocre. This metaphor serves as a starting point for the following chapters, which seek to establish whether the scribe concept is suitably applicable to Spanish novelists writing at the turn of the 20th century. At the end of the chapter, the concept of ‘literature of self-reveal’ is introduced as pivotal to the entire study. It captures the specific position of a gay writer who endeavours to translate his homoerotic experience into literature.
