Zones of critical interventions in Green Mansions (1904) by William Henry Hudson

Abstract

On the ocassion of the centenary of the Argentine-British writer W. H. Hudson (1841-1922), I will review the multiple spheres or areas in which a particular literary text, which managed to achieve the privilege of having been one of the most internationally disseminated of its production, Green Mansions, was intervened by the industry and by the interpretive community. Among the interventions that were given to the base text, we can distinguish the translations, the adaptations and the production of a film script, and the consequent film production. Among the critical texts, several dimensions can be recovered: the historical one, which treats the text as a representative of late romanticism; the rhetorical interpretation, which interprets the characters of Abel and Rima as allegorical; thematic criticism in various manifestations (nature, barbarism and civilization); colonial, postcolonial readings and cultural imperialism; ecocriticism, etc. Finally, I will highlight some narratological aspects, such as the game of “reality” and fiction, levels of strangeness in the literary text, and the game of voices.