SOURCE: "Chronicle Toward Novel: Bernal Díaz' History of the Conquest of Mexico," in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 3, Spring, 1982, pp. 197-212.

In the following essay, Cascardi describes Díaz's True History as a hybrid text that combines autobiography and fiction, and that anticipates the emergence of the novel.

For readers who felt themselves estranged from modern fiction by the very title of John Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," these have been years both for recouping losses and for gathering new forces. Barth himself inaugurated the decade with a sequel to the 1967 piece, this one bearing a far more encouraging title: "The Literature of Replenishment." It is true that there have been assessments of modern fiction as penetrating as Barth's first Atlantic article, but it must be said that few could match his title. Walter Benjamin's essay on Leskov years earlier may have been more...