Tórtola Valencia and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent: Celebrity and Self-Plagiarism

The editorial paratexts of La zarpa de la esfinge give no indication that the text had been published previously as La primera de abono. [...]Hoyos discussed the later novel without acknowledging its origin, making way for early reviewers to present it as an original work.1 On the other hand, the circumstances surrounding the transformation of La primera de abono into La zarpa de la esfinge make this case of self-plagiarism into something more than a commercially motivated ruse. According to critic María del Carmen Alfonso García, over fifty of these works reference the secondary character Julito Calabrés, a dandy who mirrors Hoyos's public persona in his literary fiction ("Decadentismo, dandismo"). The chapter titled "La primera de abono" in the text's first publication appears under the title "La tarde de gloria" in La zarpa de la esfinge. Since the chapter's original title is the only time the phrase "la primera de abono" appears in the text, its elimination in the republication conveniently removed a reminder that the publication had appeared previously under a different title. According to Sean Latham, "a burgeoning celebrity culture increasingly invested in the public trade on private scandal" provided the conditions for the proliferation of this subgenre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (45).