This thesis examines the processes of international marketisation, transnational circulation and global consecration of three authors of contemporary bestselling fiction in Spanish through a combined critical and translational perspective. In particular, the thesis studies the early works and literary trajectories of Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1951), Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964–2020), and María Dueñas (1964) by focusing on their transition from the Spanish into the transnational literary polysystem through their translation into English. First, the thesis presents a brief overview of their literary careers, then discusses the scholarly reception of their works in an attempt to map out what aspects of their narrative production have received most attention. Secondly, it relies on the translation analysis of the selected authors’ breakthrough works in Spanish alongside their English editions. This will serve as the basis for the parallel bilingual examination or “stereoscopic reading” of the novels’ text itself, and as the comparative study of their paratextual dimension.
The thesis argues that these books have been rewritten and repackaged according to some of the criteria governing the pole of commercial or large-scale literary production as defined by Bourdieu, and that this has shaped their authors’ ascent to transnational literary circulation. Interviewed editors, publishers and translators declared the appeal of these texts to the English-language market to be their detective genre, time setting, intellectual focus and cosmopolitan atmosphere. However, the translation analysis findings reveal four sites of tension in the creation of the English editions —political correctness, perception of literary genres, representation of Spanish modern history and the construction of translocal literary spaces for global consumption. In addressing these, this thesis contributes to the ever-expanding body of academic research on the symbiotic relationship between the transnational circulation, the global literary polysystem and translation as well as to the critical studies of Spanish popular fiction by establishing a concrete connection to its translational literary presence. In this sense, it posits that the above-mentioned authors feed off and capitalise on canonical literary conventions by incorporating certain aspects characteristic of world literature, and that this shows the role that translation plays in the configuration of the global. Moreover, it sheds light on the differences between the Spanish and Anglo-American publishing fields, notably insofar as the modifications in English-language editions uncover different literary compromises for authors.