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This chapter examines existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American worlds, with particular emphasis on Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (El ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, or The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha). It first reviews some precursors of existentialist thought in the Spanish world before discussing some of the key themes in Don Quixote that have made it such a generative philosophical, existentialist, and novelistic text. It then turns to a group of key figures in the Hispanic and Latin American philosophical worlds such as Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Julián Marías, Carlos Astrada, Augusto Salazar Bondy, Samuel Ramos, Leopoldo Zea, and Luis Villoro. It shows that existentialism was articulated in Spain earlier than elsewhere and hence also was sooner integrated and superseded. As Latin American philosophy and literature came into its own, existential and phenomenological insights were fused to hermeneutics alongside such indigenous traditions as liberation philosophy and magical realism.

This scene explores Torroba's career after the success of Luisa Fernanda, focusing on his subsequent stage works, increasing celebrity in Latin America, the hazards he faced during the Civil War, and his struggles with censorship during the 1940s. During the war, Torroba was briefly imprisoned for suspected right-wing activities and then sought refuge in Navarra. Torroba loved Navarra and composed many of his works there during the post-war era. He thus came to identify himself not as only as a madrileño but also as a Navarro. Considerable attention is devoted to his address (discurso) to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1935, the year in which he was elected a member. It also examines in depth his complex relations with the Franco regime, as well as his increasing love of Broadway musicals and their influence on him, the result of several visits to New York.

This chapter examines the influence of Don Quixote on twentieth-century authors. It considers the works of Miguel de Unamuno, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Frank Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges. The chapter also discusses how Cervantes' influence extended to other literary genres, in particular the theater.

Fernando Pessoa has introduced the term ‘heteronym’ for the coterie of virtual subjects whose identity he variously assumes. Within this group there is one whose name is ‘Fernando Pessoa’. When Pessoa writes about someone called ‘Fernando Pessoa’ he is employing an orthonym, and doing so precisely because within the imagined scenario he is not Fernando Pessoa. An orthonym, like a heteronym, is a virtual subject, but it is one which stands in a distinguished relationship with a simulating subject. The concept of an orthonym explains that of a literary doppelgänger.