Contemporary Latin American Literature

Contemporary Latin American Literature reflects the wealth of great writers of Latin America over the last hundred years, including Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Noble Prize winners Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. The selections--almost 100 works in their original form--include English definitions for difficult Spanish words.

This Very Short Introduction chronicles the trends and traditions of modern Latin American literature, arguing that Latin American literature developed as a continent-wide phenomenon, not just an assemblage of national literatures, in moments of political crisis. With the Spanish American War came Modernismo, the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde, and the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to be known as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers all of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andr?s Bello and Jos? Mar?a de Heredia, through Borges and Garc?a M?rquez, to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bola?o.

This collection of essays studies the depiction of contemporary urban space in twenty-first century Latin American fiction. The contributors to this volume seek to understand the characteristics that make the representation of the postmodern city in a Latin American context unique. The chapters focus on cities from a wide variety of countries in the region, highlighting the cultural and political effects of neoliberalism and globalization in the contemporary urban scene. Twenty-first century authors share an interest for images of ruins and dystopian landscapes and their view of the damaging effects of the global market in Latin America tends to be pessimistic. As the book demonstrates, however, utopian elements or “spaces of hope” can also be found in these narrations, which suggest the possibility of transforming a capitalist-dominated living space.

Moving beyond the traditional study of Hispanic literature on a nation-by-nation basis, this volume explores how globalization affects Spanish and Latin American fiction, poetry, and literary theory. Featuring contributions of scholars from the United States, Latin America, and Europe to demonstrate how Hispanic literature transcends the nation-state, the essays cross national and cultural boundaries. They draw from a range of fields, including postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies, characterizing a new "world literature" that reflects changing understandings of memory, belonging, and identity. In this innovative collection, contributors examine works by Jose Marti, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Wifredo Lam, and others. They propose that the Spanish language itself is postnational--a cosmopolitan mixture of Iberian regionalisms and indigenous American languages, its heterogeneity allowing speakers to connect across nationalities. They analyze the increasingly popular character of the voluntary exile who neither seeks to recover a lost identity nor assimilate into new environments but instead creates bonds that are not based on national origins. They survey the various explorations of masculinity in Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her and Juan Francisco Ferre's Karnaval. They probe the multilingual nature of the Spanish language itself in Cecilia Vicuna's poetry, which addresses readers in Spanish, English, and Quechua and identifies a common root. This volume shows how contemporary Hispanic writers and critics are engaging in cross-cultural literary conversations and how expanding worldviews have impacted the way these authors write and how they are read today. Contributors: Heike Scharm | Natalia Matta Jara | Nil Santiáñez | Julio Ortega | Ottmar Ette | Silvia Goldman | Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez | Francisco Brignole | Bernat Castany Prado | Francisco Fernández de Alba | Maarten Steenmeijer

Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. Challenging the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, he identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. Hoyos shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modeling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual "Nazi" histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives, and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.

Striking in its imagery, its history, and its breathtaking scope, Latin American fiction has finally come into its own throughout the world. Collected in this brilliant volume are thirty-five of the finest writers of this century, including: Jorge Luis Borges Carlos Fuentes Julio Cortazar Miguel Angel Asturias Gabriel Garcia Marquez Jorge Amado Octavio Paz Juan Bosch Jose Donoso Horacio Quiroga Mario Vargas Llosa Abelardo Castillo Guillermo Cabrera Infante And many more

This edited volume, working within the specific frame of the ‘affective turn’ in the study of contemporary sociocultural settings across Latin America, compiles a series of essays on children's presence in selected Latin American literary and cinematic expressions.

In the 1960s, there occurred amongst Latin American writers a sudden explosion of literary activity known as the ‘Boom’. It marked an increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels. But the ‘Boom’ of the 1960s should not be taken as the only flowering of Latin American fiction, for such novels dubbed ‘new novels’ were being written in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. In this edited collection, first published in 1990, Philip Swanson charts the development of Latin American fiction throughout the twentieth century. He assesses the impact of the ‘new novel’ on Latin American literature, and follows its growth. Nine key texts are analysed by contributors, including works by the ‘big four’ of the ‘Boom’ – Fuentes, Cortázar, Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa. This book will be of interest to critics and teachers of Latin American literature, and will be useful too as supplementary reading for students of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. It will also serve as a helpful introduction to those new to Latin American fiction.