“The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls
“The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls

Summary/Abstract: Loosely inspired by the author’s stay at Oxford, Javier Marías’s All Souls (1989) seems a typical campus novel. Yet, narrated retrospectively by a Spanish visiting professor after the death of two other characters, All Souls defies the conventions of the comic and satirical campus novel while anticipating the later inclusion of more serious themes in the subgenre. This article also interprets All Souls in the frame of Marías’s later text Dark Back of Time (1998), a response to the widespread misreading of All Souls as a roman à clef, especially around the publication of its English translation.

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