Abstract
This article explores ageing and masculinity in Lorenzo Silva’s novel El mal de Corcira (2020). The hard-boiled crime/detective fiction is associated in most cases with masculinity and patriarchy. In 1998, Lorenzo Silva started publishing his detective Rubén Bevilacqua’s series, a collection of twelve novels so far. Bevilacqua belongs to the Guardia Civil, the oldest Spanish law enforcement agency, which has been associated with violent and patriarchal masculinity. This novel deals with a crime that prompts the 54-year-old Bevilacqua to narrate his actions as a twenty-five-year-old guardia civil fighting against ETA in the Basque Country thirty years earlier. The middle-aged detective recollects and tells the (legal and not so legal) actions of a twenty-five-year-old self within the context of the highly masculinised and violent environment of both the Guardia Civil and ETA. Through his storytelling thirty years after the events, Bevilacqua's life writing/memoirs offers the reader an account of a personal and a collective past that highlights the passage of time and prompts his regular readers to identify and feel their own ageing.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Bulletin of Spanish Studies |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 24 Feb 2022 |
Bibliographical note
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Bulletin of Spanish Studies on [date of publication here when available], available online: [DOI here when available]. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Keywords
- Ageing
- masculinities
- violent masculinities
- Detective Fiction
- hegemonic masculinity
- feminity
- homosexuality
- ETA
- Guardia Civil
- Lorenzo Silva