SOURCE: Durán, Manuel. “Fiction and Metafiction in Contemporary Spanish Letters.” World Literature Today 60, no. 3 (summer 1986): 398-402.

In the following essay, Durán underscores the influence of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote on contemporary Spanish fiction and identifies several important Spanish authors.

Slowly but steadily the Spanish novel has been changing course during the last decade. The trend is toward a more complex, less realistic narrative, one in which the author is often obviously present, pulling the strings and organizing the scene. We may call this new Spanish novel a “self-referential novel,” as does Robert Spires,¹ or, as other critics do, “metafiction.” It is useful to compare this trend with the origins of modern Spanish fiction, the picaresque novel and Cervantes's Don Quixote. Indeed, many contemporary Spanish novels are indebted to these classic works, and even when they conquer new literary spaces, the extent of the conquest can...