Beyond Individualism - Portraying Collective Selfhood in Latin American Literature and Art

"Expanding the reach of her previous, award-winning book with this Press, Lois Zamora further complicates and challenges the kinds of periods and categories for Latin American literature and art imposed on the Americas by (Old) Europe. She argues that characters and figures in recent Latin American fiction and artworks are identified not so much by their psychological specificity as by their affiliations to family, community, and clan, and by religious order, village, country house, or ideal planet. Zamora shows them to be less like individuals, and more like types or archetypes-sometime stereotypes-and occasionally spirits, ideas, or emblems. In the fiction and visual art she surveys in Beyond Individualism, Zamora finds that belonging and participation are more important than autonomy, i.e., selves in relation, embedded and embodied in larger systems. These characters and figures are, for Zamora, unstable nodes in historical networks that precede and succeed individual instances, where collective characteristics overshadow idiosyncratic interiority-all in an effort to produce both visual art and literature that is less personal than political. Zamora describes a different kind of "enlightenment" than the one that developed in North America and in Europe, one that produced figures in Latin American fiction and art that moved toward symbolic status in collective currents, an energy that impelled new and different kinds of reciprocities between self and society, interiority and community, history and myth"--

About the author

Lois Parkinson Zamora is the Moores Distinguished Professor of literature and art at the University of Houston. Her books include The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product details

• Authors: Lois Parkinson Zamora, Zamora Lois Parkinson
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 19.11.2025
• EAN: 9780226843179
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84317-9
• No. of pages: 368
• Weight: 454 g
• Illustrations: 25 color plates, 82 halftones
• Series: Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art; Ethnic Studies, Latin America, ART / Caribbean & Latin American, LITERARY CRITICISM / Caribbean & Latin American, History of art / art & design styles, Caribbean islands, History of Art, Literature: history & criticism, Latin America – Mexico, Central America, South America, History of the Americas, Literature: history and criticism, Relating to Latin / Hispanic American people, Hispanic & Latino Studies, Relating to Latin / Hispanic US American people