The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, edited by Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, is the most important compilation on Cuban literature and culture in recent years. Gathering scholars from Cuba, the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, it offers new interpretations of canonical authors as well as extensive commentaries on recent trends in Cuban literature, including the literature of the diaspora, performance arts, and the 1959 revolution’s early discontents.

This essay on Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a prolific author who straddled both Spanish American and Spanish Romanticism, traces her role as literary precursor and transatlantic intellectual.  It revisits Gómez de Avellaneda’s fiction from Sab (1841), the earliest anti-slavery work in the Americas, to her last novel, El artista barquero o los cuatro cinco de julio (1861), set in Marseille, a roman à clef on her own hard-won literary vocation.