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Mexico in Its Novel is a perceptive examination of the Mexican reality as revealed through the nation's novel. The author presents the Mexican novel as a cultural phenomenon: a manifestation of the impact of history upon the nation, an attempt by a people to come to grips with and understand what has happened and is happening to them. Written in a clear and graceful style, this study examines the life of the novel as a genre against the background of Mexican chronology. It begins with a survey of the mid-twentieth-century novel, the Mexican novel which came of age in the period following the 1947 publication of Agustín Yáñez's The Edge of the Storm. During this time the novel resolved som...
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A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Spanish American novels of the Boom period (1962-1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century's novels. In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the...
The Latin American novel burst onto the international literary scene with the Boom era--led by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa--and has influenced writers throughout the world ever since. García Márquez and Vargas Llosa each received the Nobel Prize in literature, and many of the best-known contemporary novelists are inspired by the region's fiction. Indeed, magical realism, the style associated with García Márquez, has left a profound imprint on African American, African, Asian, Anglophone Caribbean, and Latinx writers. Furthermore, post-Boom literature continues to garner interest, from the novels of Roberto Bolaño to the works of Cés...
This book offers a comprehensive account of modern Spanish culture, tracing its dramatic and often unexpected development from its beginnings after the Revolution of 1868 to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading experts provide analyses of the historical and political background of modern Spain, the culture of the major autonomous regions (notably Castile, Catalonia, and the Basque Country), and the country's literature: narrative, poetry, theatre and the essay. Spain's recent development is divided into three main phases: from 1868 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; the period of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco; and the post-Franco arrival of democracy. The concept of 'Spanish culture' is investigated, and there are studies of Spanish painting and sculpture, architecture, cinema, dance, music, and the modern media. A chronology and guides to further reading are provided, making the volume an invaluable introduction to the politics, literature and culture of modern Spain.
The recent fiction of Spanish America has been widely acclaimed for its experimental and revolutionary qualities. In Reclaiming the Author, Lucille Kerr studies the sources of power of this newly emergent literature in her detailed examination of the critical concept of "the author." Kerr considers how Spanish American narratives raise questions about authorial identity and activity through the different figures of the author they propose. These author-figures, she maintains, both complement and contradict notions of authority that exist outside of the world of fiction. By focusing on works by well-known Spanish American authors--Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Poniatowska, Puig, and Vargas Llosa--Kerr shows how the Spanish Americans have formed a radical poetics of the author. Her readings demonstrate how exemplary Spanish American texts, such as Rayuela, Terra nostra, and El hablador, call into question the author as a unitary or uniform, and therefore unproblematical, figure. Individually and together, Kerr's readings reclaim "the author" as a complex critical concept encompassing diverse, conflicting, even competitive roles.
Edward Wright-Rios examines the much-maligned--and sometimes celebrated--character of Madre Matiana and her position in the development of Mexico.
The codes of conduct imposed on females by Spain's dictator Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) created a stifling environment for women until his death in 1975. Beginning with Carmen Laforet's 1944 Nadal Prize-winning novel Nada, novels by women - many of which explore female identity - began to proliferate in Spain. The works examined in this study - Nada, Primera memoria (1960) by Ana Maria Matute, La placa del Diamant (1962) by Merce Rodoreda, Julia (1969) by Ana Maria Moix, El cuarto de atras (1978) by Carmen Martin Gaite, El amor es un juego solitario (1979) by Esther Tusquets, and Questio d'amor propi (1987) by Carme Riera - feature female protagonists struggling for self-realization and, by extension, for change in a restrictive Spanish society. Schumm's analysis of the seven novels demonstrates how examination of metaphoric tropes and mirror images provides insight into the protagonists' development.
Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and elsewhere. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them The Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater. In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division.
A comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature includes over 400 entries written by experts in the field of Latin American studies. Most entries are of 1500 words but the encyclopedia also includes survey articles of up to 10,000 words on the literature of individual countries, of the colonial period, and of ethnic minorities, including the Hispanic communities in the United States. Besides presenting and illuminating the traditional canon, the encyclopedia also stresses the contribution made by women authors and by contemporary writers. Outstanding Reference Source Outstanding Reference Book