"Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentieth-century Spanish-American novel. Asturias's literary apprenticeship in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s is arguably the most crucial and least understood period of his career. In forging his definitions of Guatemalan cultural identity and Spanish-American modernity from a French vantage point, Asturias made literary innovations and generated cultural paradoxes which have proved central to subsequent generations of writers. This study of Asturias's early academic writings, journalism and short fiction, and of his first major novel, ""El se""or presidente, provides a prehistory of the contemporary Spanish-American novel."

Stephen Henighan

Introduction 1 Asturias in Guatemala 2 The Parisian Background and the Choice of an Identity 3 The Constitution of an Identity: Asturias's Parisian Journalism 4 Approaches to a Self: Asturias's Parisian Fiction to 'La barba provisional' 5 Leyendas de Guatemala: The Poetry of the Divided Self 16 Light in the Shadow, Shadow in the Light: El senor president, Conclusion