The ""idle fictions"" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel's development. Yet, as P?rez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated ""a class war not between social classes but between literary classes."" Concentrating on source material not widely available, P?rez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of t