Modern Latin American Fiction

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.

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.

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 book introduces readers to the evolution of modern fiction in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Presents Latin American fiction in its cultural and political contexts. Introduces debates about how to read this literature. Combines an overview of the evolution of modern Latin American fiction with detailed studies of key texts. Discusses authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Isabel Allende. Covers nation-building narratives, ‘modernismo’, the New Novel, the Boom, the Post-Boom, Magical Realism, Hispanic fiction in the USA, and more.

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.

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.

Essays focus on the works of Garcia Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa and Puig.