The aim of this dissertation is to enrich the scope of the world-literature models with Sino-Hispanic encounters. Since the second half of the twentieth century, world-systems theorists have shaped our understanding of geopolitical and cultural dynamics according to "core-states and peripheral areas" - which model representative scholars also believe governs the paradigms of world literature production and consumption. Evoking Goethe's idealist definition, I emphasize peripheral and semi-peripheral areas to show how certain literary examples influence each other in or outside the space described by world-systems theory within specific geopolitical, social and cultural realities.

I trace three moments of modern Chinese history to analyze distinct cases of literary cross-cultural exchanges between contemporary literature in Chinese and in Spanish. I start with the friendship between Ai Qing 艾青 (1910-1996) and Chilean Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), molded by anti-imperialist ideologies, which I find representative of institutionalized internationalism within the socialist block during the Cold War. I then move to the exchange between Bei Dao 北島 (b. 1949) and Spanish Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), made possible by underground trends among writers towards the end of the seventies in China, in which Bei Dao's menglong 朦朧 (obscure) poetics incorporate Lorca's duende to result in fragmented imagery and interpersonal affect. Then I look at the late nineties interaction between Xi Chuan 西川 (b. 1963) and Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), established through Xi's translation of a collection of Borges' interviews, and their similar poetic visions regarding cultural authenticity and identity.

These exchanges are the result of complex articulations of shared and personal literary roots, politics and culture, they reflect distinct stages of contemporary Chinese literary history which not only mirror the function of foreign poetry but at a broader level reaffirm the importance of subversive alternative world literature realities and the need to access and study them in order to create a more objective picture.