Talk by Noël Valis on "Celebrity, Sex, and Mass Readership: The Case of Álvaro Rentana."

This talk draws new attention to Álvaro Retana, an immensely popular figure in Spain’s pre-Civil War period, who wrote racy, erotic novels. A reappraisal of his literary career illuminates the broader cultural context of Spanish society of the early twentieth century. Professor Valis is the author of The Culture of Cursilería: Bad Taste, Kitsch and Class in Modern Spain (Duke University Press), which won the Modern Language Association’s 2003 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, the highest award for a book in the foreign languages. More recently, she published Sacred Realism: Religion and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative(Yale University Press). Professor Noël Valis, Yales University