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"A series of wars and revolutions provide the fiery, unsettled bedrock for mid-twentieth-century Latin American literature: on a global scale, World War II and the Cold War mar political alliances; the Cuban Revolution, Peronist Argentina, and the 1968 student movements are some of the regional responses that develop from these international conflicts. Latching onto a transforming world, authors in this era appropriate the discomfort of transition to produce literary works of international acclaim. Mid-century Latin American literature has been framed as a market-driven phenomenon that opened the region up through an exoticization that captured international recognition. This volume takes a different approach, one that rests uncomfortably on a deep political instability - worldwide as well as regional - that is engaged aesthetically by literary authors. It argues that the literature of mid-century Latin America locates its strength within global and regional political conflicts, as well as from within the cultural and social tensions spurred on by economic disparities"--
List of contents
I. War, Revolution, Dictatorship: 1. Revolutions and Literary Transitions: the 1960s Jorge Fornet; 2. Jorge Luis Borges: Probing the Limits of World War Kate Jenckes; 3. Antifascism and Literature in Brazil: The Many Wars of Antônio Callado Daniel Mandur Thomaz; 4. Disaster Innovation in the Mid-Century Spanish-American Novel: Carpentier, Asturias, Donoso Stephen Henighan; 5. Struggle at the Margins: The Intersections of Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Brazil's Literature of Revolution Rebecca Atencio; II. Metropolis and Ruins: 6. Economic, Political and Ecological Disasters: The Metropolis and its Ruins in Latin American Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s Cecilia Enjuto Rangel; 7. Mexican-Miracle Modernism Ignacio Sánchez Prado; 8. Crime and the City: A Critical Walk through Latin American Crime Fiction and Urban Places Emilio J. Gallardo; III. Solidarity: 9. 'Dar testimonio' as a Form of Solidarity and a Lens for Rethinking the Mexican Literary Canon Sarah Bowskill; 10. Landscapes of Heterogeneity in a Mid-Twentieth Century Quechua Poem Charles Pigott; 11. Beyond the Nation Frame: Rethinking the Presence of Indigenous Literatures in the Spanish-American Novel circa 1950 Estelle Tarica; 12. Femininity in Flux: Gabriela Mistral's Madwomen Amanda Holmes; 13. The Representation of Afro-Cuban Orality by Fernando Ortiz, Lydia Cabrera and Nicolás Guillén Miguel Arnedo Gómez; IV. Aesthetics and Innovation: 14. Eros: After Surrealism and Before the Revolution (1945-1967) Sarah Ann Wells; 15. Alejo Carpentier: Some Brief Bio-Bibliographical Notes Rafael Rodríguez Beltrán and The Return of the Galleons: Transitions in the Work of Alejo Carpentier Graziella Pogolotti; 16. 'Un híbrido de halcón y jicotea.' Testimonio and its Challenge to the Latin American Literary Canon Par Kumaraswami; 17. Literature and Revolution in Transition: An Aesthetics of Singularity Bruno Bosteels; 18. Confluence and Divergence: Avant-garde Poetics in Twentieth-Century Spanish America and Brazil Odile Cisneros; 19. Cortázar's Transitional Poetics: Experiments in Verse behind Experiments in Prose Marcy Schwarz.
About the author
Amanda Holmes is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at McGill University. She has written extensively on Latin American cultures. Her publications include City Fictions: Language, Body and Spanish American Urban Space (2007), Politics of Architecture in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (2017), and Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America, co-edited with Richard Young (2010).Par Kumaraswami is Professor of Latin American Studies and Director of the Centre for Research on Cuba/Cuba Research Forum at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-Building and the Book (with Antoni Kapcia, 2012) and The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba: Narrative, Identity and Well-being (2016).
Summary
This book will appeal to students and researchers of Latin American literature at all levels. It offers an over-arching thematic analysis based on core themes and contexts of the period as well as discrete author-based chapters, presenting studies of canonical authors alongside less-recognised writers, including women and indigenous writers.
