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This book is a series of original, critical meditations on short stories and novels from Central America between 1995 and 2016. During the Cold War, literary art in Central America, as in Latin America in general, was strongly over-determined by the politics of the Cold War, which gave rise to popular struggle and three major armed civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The period produced intense literary activity with political ideology central, personified by social denunciation in the testimonial novel and revolutionary poetry. Since then, though themes of violence are still at much of its core, Central American fiction has become more complex. We have...
Cicatrices offers an understanding of the current mood in Central American fiction as writers attempt to come to terms with a collapsing social, political and economic landscape dominated by forced migration, drug trafficking, corruption and the struggle to establish fully democratic societies. Writers adopt various narrative strategies to account for this in fictional form, most typically the crime novel cum critical realism and the political thriller, but also a kind of impressionist realism as well as auto-fiction and fictional testimony. Thematic unity is provided by displacement in all its guises and the inability to leave behind a problematic past that bleeds into the present scars tha...
In "Metaphors," Samuel Rovinski (Costa Rica) shows how a writer's superficial attempt to interpret experience metaphorically cripples him in social circumstances, while, in "Gloria Wouldn't Wait," Panamanian Jaime Garcia Saucedo focuses on the egotism of the writer's imagination as it tries to convert the tragedies of everyday life into some kind of literary document whose artistic qualities would belie their actual reality." "Human - and humane - values in the face of adversity are celebrated throughout, even when seemingly futile in the midst of overwhelming odds. Contemporary Short Stories from Central America embraces every aspect of the human condition addressed by the literature of the Western world and demonstrates the cultural vitality of our Central American neighbors."--BOOK JACKET.
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.
What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about the past? This study explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.
Central America has a long history as a site of cultural and political exchange, from Mayan and Nahua trade networks to the effects of Spanish imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. In Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, instructors will find practical, interdisciplinary, and innovative pedagogical approaches to the cultures of Central America that are adaptable to various fields of study. The essays map out classroom lessons that encourage students to relate writings and films to their own experience of global interconnectedness and to read critically the history that binds Central America to the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean. In the context of debates ...
This work traces how Gothic imagination from the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century US and European film has impacted Latin American literature and film culture. Serrano argues that the Gothic has provided Latin American authors with a way to critique a number of issues, including colonization, authoritarianism, feudalism, and patriarchy. The book includes a literary history of the European Gothic to demonstrate how Latin American authors have incorporated its characteristics but also how they have broken away or inverted some elements, such as traditional plot lines, to suit their work and address a unique set of issues. The book examines both the modernistas of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde writers of the twentieth century, including Huidobro, Bombal, Rulfo, Roa Bastos, and Fuentes. Looking at the Gothic in Latin American literature and film, this book is a groundbreaking study that brings a fresh perspective to Latin American creative culture.
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.
These twenty-plus short stories by leading Central American writers, by turns unsettling, absurd, tragic, exhilarating, and mystical, introduce us to the people behind the front-page horrors . . . A Torruban Indian loses a month's pay with a bad roll of the dice . . . The beautiful young Anita hunts beetles and cockroaches . . . To up its popularity rating, a government stages the first "Miss Underdeveloped Contest" . . . After the 1954 massacres in Guatemala, children hold a funeral for a bird . . . Reflecting a wide range of styles, these stories point in new directions while evincing the particular strength and courage it takes to write in a war-torn country.
Characters are made, scripted, and invented, but Creators and Created Beings in Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction explores what occurs when literary creations become creators themselves. Representing Latin American fiction’s increasingly skeptical gaze in the early- to mid- twentieth century, these literary creators breach the metafictional frame in order to problematize themes including life and death, gender and sexuality, and technology. Drawing upon a diverse range of literary works by canonical and non-canonical authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, María Luisa Bombal, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Arlt, Juan José Arreola, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Clemente Palma, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Pedro Angelici, this study excavates critical ontological and epistemological inquiries and delves into questions of identity, power, scientific knowledge, and the transformative nature of fiction.