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These essays reflect a view admittedly skeptical of the movements, isms, and theories devised by many scholars in their reading of important writers. Earle prefers to see Cervantes, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriela Mistral, and Garcia Marquez, for example, as basically autonomous. Like most great authors, they don't fit within trends. Two words in this book's subtitle - self and circumstance - signal a concept of the writer's function in Spain and Hispanic America as primarily autobiographical and historical. Ortega y Gasset's declaration, Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, is really every writer's dictum - particularly of those in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who experienced in a vital way the ambiguities of the modern Hispanic World.
The Limits of Identity is a polemical critique of the repudiation of universalism and the theoretical commitment to identity and difference embedded in Latin American literary and cultural studies. Through original readings of foundational Latin American thinkers (such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó) and contemporary theorists (such as John Beverley and Doris Sommer), Charles Hatfield reveals and challenges the anti-universalism that informs seemingly disparate theoretical projects. The Limits of Identity offers a critical reexamination of widely held conceptions of culture, ideology, interpretation, and history. The repudiation of universalism, Hatfield argues, creates a set of problems that are both theoretical and political. Even though the recognition of identity and difference is normally thought to be a form of resistance, The Limits of Identity claims that, in fact, the opposite is true.
Long acclaimed by Latin American critics, the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig became best known in this country for his novel Kiss of the Spider Woman. While Puig's seven novels are available in translation, an immense body of criticism and many of his most important interviews remain inaccessible to the non-Spanish reader. Written especially for the English-speaking audience, this study analyzes aspects of Puig's novels, summarizing the most important criticism in Spanish, and offers a biographical sketch of the man, making available for the first time in English selections from the most informative interviews. Readings of each of Puig's novels combined with Lavers's overview of the criticism in Spanish provide new insights into one of the most original and profound bodies of fiction of any current writer.
In Andean Bolivia, racial and cultural differences are most visibly marked on women, who often still wear native dress and speak an indigenous language rather than Spanish. In this study of modernity in Bolivia, Marcia Stephenson explores how the state's desire for a racially and culturally homogenous society has been deployed through images of womanhood that promote the notion of an idealized, acculturated female body. Stephenson engages a variety of texts-critical essays, novels, indigenous testimonials, education manuals, self-help pamphlets, and position papers of diverse women's organizations-to analyze how the interlocking tropes of fashion, motherhood, domestication, hygiene, and hunger are used as tools for the production of dominant, racialized ideologies of womanhood. At the same time, she also uncovers long-standing patterns of resistance to the modernizing impulse, especially in the large-scale mobilization of indigenous peoples who have made it clear that they will negotiate the terms of modernity, but always "as Indians."
This study examines a series of recurring patterns that can be observed in Miguel de Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares (1613). Author E. T. Aylward proposes that the precise ordering of Cervantes's twelve novellas is based on the thematic and structural patterns of the individual stories contained in the collection.
Reading Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf's canonical A Room of One's Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women's road narratives. The study shows how women's literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque "open road", or, more generally, the "freedom of the road". Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writin...
Cuba’s José Lezama Lima became the most controversial figure in the flowering of the Latin American novel with the 1966 publication of Paradiso. Hailed as a seminal writer of breathtaking originality by Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama was also attacked by the Castro regime and others for his stylistic obscurity, erotic descriptions, and violation of literary norms. Indeed, his experimental fiction, written on the very boundaries of the novelistic genre, resists classification. José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision, a much-needed critical study of Paradiso, Oppiano Licario, and Lezama’s essays, is thus an exploration in reading, one that highlights and preserve...
Magic realism has long been treated as a phenomenon restricted to postcolonial literature. Drawing on works from Britain, Lies that Tell the Truth compellingly shows how magic realist fiction can be produced also at what is usually considered to be the cultural centre without forfeiting the mode's postcolonial attitude and aims. A close analysis of works by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Robert Nye and others reveals how the techniques of magic realism generate a complex critique of the West's rational-empirical worldview from within a Western context itself. Understanding magic realism as a fictional analogue of anthropology and sociology, Lies that Tell the Truth reads the mode as a frequently humorous but at the same time critical investigation into people's attempts to make sense of their world. By laying bare the manifold strategies employed to make meaning, magic realist fiction indicates that knowledge and reality cannot be reduced to hard facts, but that people's dreams and fears, ideas, stories and beliefs must equally be taken into account.