In 1962, Unesco declared her the most-read Spanish author alongside Cervantes. [...] Mario Vargas Llosa [...] has supplied the prologue to the translation.
“[Tellado] was, in all likelihood, the most significant sociocultural phenomenon in the Spanish language since the Golden Age,” writes the Peruvian-born Nobel laureate. “What might ostensibly appear to be heresy – and from a qualitative perspective it is – ceases to be so if we begin to view things in quantitative terms. Borges, García Márquez, Ortega y Gasset, any of the most original thinkers and writers in my language that you might care to mention, none of them have reached as many readers or had so great an influence on the way in which people feel, speak, love, hate, understand life and human relations, than María del Socorro Tellado López, Socorrín to her friends.”
Duncan Wheeler, associate professor of Spanish studies at the University of Leeds, was researching the cultural politics of Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy when he noticed that her readers had been ignominiously lumped in with fans of Julio Iglesias and his ilk.The details of the translation are:
After devouring 50 of her books bought for a euro each at Madrid’s El Rastro flea market four years ago, he began to look beyond the comparisons with Cartland and consider Tellado as a chronicler of Spanish society [...] the books offer a valuable overview of an evolving Spain. Not only do they reflect the changing status of women as the tourism boom allowed them to leave home to work in hotels and other service industries, they also depict the country’s nascent celebrity culture and its fascination with all things American. (The Guardian)
Corín Tellado, Thursdays with Leila, trans. Duncan Wheeler, intro. Diana Holmes and Duncan Wheeler, prologue Mario Vargas Llosa (Cambridge: MHRA New Translations, 2016)
More details of the cost and how to obtain the volume are available from The Modern Humanities Research Association.
crime/thriller books are the single most popular type of fiction in Scotland.
In a recent Ipsos MORI Scotland survey of 1,000 adults, just over 1 in 4 Scots (27%) who read for enjoyment said that books which fictionalise crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives topped their choice of reading or listening genres. The next most popular genre were science fiction/fantasy and biography/autobiography, both at 10%, followed by historical fiction at 9%.
While the crime genre was the most popular among readers of all ages, the second most popular genre among young readers (aged 16-34) was science fiction/fantasy (15%), while readers aged 55 and over chose historical fiction as their second preference (14%). (Scottish Book Trust)
this is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances, it's not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society, including such matters as the selfishness of our Western consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is ever widening.Earlier this year she was on the BBC arguing that romance is feminist and a lot more of her thoughts on that and other issues in the genre can be found in this short booklet about Harlequin Mills & Boon romances. Among the most thought-provoking parts for me was the one on "defamiliarisation":
Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the term 'defamiliarisation'. He used this to describe the capacity of art to invest the familiar with strangeness and thereby enhance perception.
'Defamiliarisation' is not simply a question of perception; it is the essence of literariness. Authors who 'bare the device' in literature and expose literature's artificiality, defamiliarise its tropes and render it into 'true art'.
Mills & Boons do this repeatedly.
this
is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend
disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances,
it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The
story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society,
including such matters as the selfishness of our Western
consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and
‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at:
http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf
this
is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend
disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances,
it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The
story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society,
including such matters as the selfishness of our Western
consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and
‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at:
http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf
this
is a romance where the author is asking her readers to suspend
disbelief quite a lot. However, like most Mills & Boon romances,
it’s not as empty-headed as literary critics would have you believe. The
story raises several issues of interest to contemporary society,
including such matters as the selfishness of our Western
consumption-driven culture in which the gulf between the ‘haves’ and
‘have-nots’ is ever widening. - See more at:
http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/the-shifters-choice-jenna-kernan/#sthash.Uw7pzzPj.b9eMPXVX.dpuf
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