Irony, Popular Art, and Progressive Education in Little Mexican

This chapter explores Little Mexican and Other Stories (1924), Huxley’s third book of short fiction. It analyzes the following stories: “Little Mexican,” “Hubert and Minnie,” “Fard,” “The Portrait,” and “Young Archimedes.” The chapter shows that Huxley not only built on the topics from the previous two collections such as toxic masculinity and pseudo-intellectualism, but that he broadened his thematic scope by criticizing popular art and advocating for progressive education, promoted at the time by Maria Montessori and John Dewey. The interpretations of these five stories indicate the complexity of Huxley’s irony and intertextuality, drawing parallels between his stories and the works of other European modernists. This chapter also demonstrates that Huxley experimented with auditory aspects of literature and continued to warn about Italian Fascism before the majority of modernist authors understood its potential for bringing suffering and destruction to the European continent.