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Barrio-logos : Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture
Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave rise to much of Chicano history and culture. In this book, the author explores how California Chicano writers, journalists, artists, activists and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programmes and the massive freeway development, and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place identity. Villa opens with a historical overview of the Chicano communities and culture showing how these have developed in response to conflicts over space since the US annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840's. The author examines contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia.
Bridges, Borders, and Breaks : History, Narrative, and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Chicana/o Literary Criticism
This volume reassesses the field of Chicana/o literary studies in light of the rise of Latina/o studies, the recovery of a large body of early literature by Mexican Americans, and the "transnational turn" in American studies. The chapters reveal how "Chicano" defines a literary critical sensibility as well as a political one and show how this view can yield new insights about the status of Mexican Americans, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing prospects for social justice. Chicana/o literary representations emerge as significant examples of the local that interrogate globalization's attempts to erase difference. They also highlight how Chicana/o literary studies' interests in racial justice and the minority experience have produced important intersections with new disciplines while also retaining a distinctive character. The recalibration of Chicana/o literary studies in light of these shifts raises important methodological and disciplinary questions, which these chapters address as they introduce the new tools required for the study of Chicana/o literature at this critical juncture.
Brown on Brown : Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity
Common conceptions permeating U.S. ethnic queer theory tend to confuse aesthetics with real-world acts and politics. Often Chicano/a representations of gay and lesbian experiences in literature and film are analyzed simply as propaganda. The cognitive, emotional, and narrational ingredients (that is, the subject matter and the formal traits) of those representations are frequently reduced to a priori agendas that emphasize a politics of difference. In this book, Frederick Luis Aldama follows an entirely different approach. He investigates the ways in which race and gay/lesbian sexuality intersect and operate in Chicano/a literature and film while taking into full account their imaginative nature and therefore the specific kind of work invested in them. Also, Aldama frames his analyses within today's larger (globalized) context of postcolonial literary and filmic canons that seek to normalize heterosexual identity and experience. Throughout the book, Aldama applies his innovative approach to throw new light on the work of authors Arturo Islas, Richard Rodriguez, John Rechy, Ana Castillo, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor, as well as that of film director Edward James Olmos. In doing so, Aldama aims to integrate and deepen Chicano literary and filmic studies within a comparative perspective. Aldama's unusual juxtapositions of narrative materials and cultural personae, and his premise that literature and film produce fictional examples of a social and historical reality concerned with ethnic and sexual issues largely unresolved, make this book relevant to a wide range of readers.
Chicana Creativity and Criticism
This provocative combination of original poetry, prose, criticism, and visual art documents the continuing growth of literature by and about Chicanas. Through innovative use of language and images, the artists represented here explore female sexuality, economic and social injustice, gender roles, and the contributions of critical theory. Chicana Creativity and Criticism, first published in 1988, includes poetry by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, Evangelina Vigil-Pi?on, Denise Chávez, and Naomi Qui?onez; prose by Alma E. Cervantes, Helena María Viramontes, Roberta Fernández, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor; criticism by Tey Diana Rebolledo, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Norma Alarcon, and María Herrera-Sobek; and art by Carmen Lomas Garza, Yreina Cervántez, and Laura Aguilar.
Chicano Nations : The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Chicano Nations argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the "new world" debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. This is where Marissa K. López locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been "postnational," encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing its long history and the diversity of subject positions it encompasses, Chicano Nations explores the shifting literary forms authors have used to write the nation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. López argues that while national and global tensions lie at the historical heart of Chicana/o narratives of the nation, there should be alternative ways to imagine the significance of Chicano literature other than as a reflection of national identity. In a nuanced analysis, the book provides a way to think of early writers as a meaningful part of Chicano literary history, and, in looking at the nation, rather than the particularities of identity, as that which connects Chicano literature over time, it engages the emerging hemispheric scholarship on U.S. literature.
Colonial Latin American Literature
A vivid account of the literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this Very Short Introduction explores the origins of Latin American literature in Spanish and tells the story of how Spanish literary language developed andflourished in the New World. A leading scholar of colonial Latin American literature, Rolena Adorno examines the writings that debated the justice of the Spanish conquests, described the novelties of New World nature, expressed the creativity of Hispanic baroque culture in epic, lyric, and satiricalpoetry, and anticipated Latin American Independence. The works of Spanish, creole, and Amerindian authors highlighted here, including Bartolome de las Casas, Felipe Guaman Poma, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Andres Bello, have been chosen for the merits of their writings, their participation in the larger literary and cultural debates of their times,and their resonance among readers today.
Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature
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.
The Corn Woman: Stories and Legends of the Hispanic Southwest : Stories and Legends of the Hispanic Southwest
The culture, history, and spirit of the Hispanic Southwest are brought to readers through this fascinating collection of 45 cuentos (stories and legends) from the region. From ancient creation myths of the Aztecs and traditional tales of Spanish colonialists to an eclectic sampling of the work of modern Latino storytellers, this book provides a rich tapestry of both obscure and well-loved stories-religious stories; animal tales; stories of magic, transformation, and wisdom; and chistes (short comic tales). Fifteen tales are also presented in Spanish. The origin and historical development of the stories are examined in an introductory chapter. A discussion of dichos (proverbs) and adivinanzas (riddles) illuminates the larger context of the oral tradition in which the tales have flourished. Lavishly illustrated with pictures of original paintings and sculpture by contemporary Latino artists, this fascinating collection will appeal to children and adults alike and is a must for the multicultural class
Critical Insights: Contemporary Latin American Fiction
This volume will explore contemporary Latin American fiction and will focus on authors born after 1950 and works published since the mid-1990s. Authors include Chilean Roberto Bolano, Mexican Daniel Sada, and Costa Rican Ana Cristina Rossi. The volume will also deal with the presence of social media and new technology in current Latin American literature.
Critical Insights: Gabriel García Márquez
There are several compendiums in English about the life and work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, that help to amplify our understanding of his influence; among the most rewarding are those by Harold Bloom and Gene H. Bell- Villada. In selecting the essays for this volume, the objective has been to reach further and deeper into Garcia Marquez's works while offering a panoramic view of its principal motifs and obsessions.
Critical Insights: Isabel Allende
The border between fact and fiction has always been a porous one for Isabel Allende. Her acclaimed first novel, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather yet is filled with ghosts and green-haired and clairvoyant women; her memoir Paula, though ostensibly nonfiction, is a moving and highly imaginative account of her family history and the illness and death of her daughter, Paula. Even in the many interviews she has given, Allende has embellished the details of her life to captivate and charm her readers. She has more than succeeded. Around the world, readers have flocked to both her fiction and her nonfiction, making her one of the best-selling women novelists in the world today. Edited and with an introduction by John Rodden, a celebrated Allende scholar, this volume in the Critical Insights series brings together a variety of essays on this Chilean Scheherazade.
Critical Insights: Mario Vargas Llosa
Unarguably the greatest active Spanish language novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 2010 for, in the Swedish Academy s words, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat. Beginning with Time of the Hero (1963), the searing virtuoso modernist portrayal of the Leoncio Prado military school, which he had in fact attended, to the recent El heroe discreto (The Discrete Hero) (2013), which presents an optimistic vision of his contemporary native Peru, Vargas Llosa has created an unusually vivid and complex fresco of his country s twentieth and twenty first century s political and social evolution. Vargas Llosa has also compellingly portrayed a peasant rebellion in 19th century Brazil in his masterwork The War of the End of the World (1983), the brutal regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in his The Feast of the Goat (2000), Flora Tristan s and her grandson Paul Gauguin s search for political and artistic utopias in The Way to Paradise (2003), and the personal and political struggles of English diplomat and Irish independence activist Roger Casement in The Dream of the Celt (2010)."
Critical Insights: Roberto Bolaño
The New York Times once hailed Chilean poet and author Roberto Bolano as 'the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation.' As author of such acclaimed works as Los Detectives Salvajes, 2666, Amuleto, and Una novelita lumpen, Bolano led an unsettled, turbulent life full of revolution and provocation tones that burst through in every word he wrote. This volume examines that life, as well as Bolano's literary politics and influences.
Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street
Easily one of the most critically and commercially successful novels by a Mexican American writer. Since its publication in 1984, more than one million copies have been sold, and it regularly appears on high school and college reading lists. In deceptively simple prose, it tells the stories of a young Mexican American girl's family and friends and of her coming-of-age within an impoverished Chicago neighborhood.
Dancing with Ghosts : A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas
This first critical biography of Arturo Islas (19381991) brings to life the complex and overlapping worlds inhabited by the gay Chicano poet, novelist, scholar, and professor. Gracefully written and deeply researched, Dancing with Ghosts considers both the larger questions of Islas's life--his sexuality, racial identification, and political personality--and the events of his everyday existence, from his childhood in the borderlands of El Paso to his adulthood in San Francisco and at Stanford University. Frederick Aldama portrays the many facets of Islas's engaging and often contradictory personality. He also explores Islas's coming into the craft of poetry and fiction--his extraordinary struggle to publish his novels, The Rain God, La Mollie and the King of Tears, and Migrant Souls--as well as his pivotal role in paving the way for a new generation of Chicano/a scholars and writers. Through a skillful interweaving of life history, criticism, and literary theory, Aldama paints an unusually rich and wide-ranging portrait of both the man and the eventful times in which he lived. He describes Islas's struggle with polio as a child, his near-death experience and ileostomy as a thirty-year-old beginning to explore his queer sexuality in San Francisco in the 1970s, and his fatal struggle with AIDS in the late 1980s. Drawing from hundreds of unpublished letters, lecture notes, drafts of essays, novels, and poetry archived at Stanford University, Aldama also deals frankly with the controversies that swirled around Islas's impassioned love life, his drug addictions, and his scholarly and professional career as one of the first Chicano/a professors in the United States. He discusses the importance of Islas's pioneering role in bridging Anglo, Latin American, Chicano/a, and European storytelling styles and voices. Dancing with Ghosts succeeds brilliantly both as an account of a fascinating life that embraced many different worlds and as a chronicle of the grand historical shifts that transformed the late-twentieth-century American cultural landscape.
The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
The Death of Artemio Cruz, published in 1962, proved to be a breakthrough novel for Carlos Fuentes, as it solidified his place as one of Mexico’s most revered literary figures. Through a series of flashbacks, the novel chronicles the life of Artemio Cruz, the tragic protagonist, as he loses his boyhood idealism and amasses both power and wealth in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz features a collection of captivating and informative critical essays that will enhance a reader's understanding of and appreciation for this paramount work of modern Latin American literature.
Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 draws together entries on all aspects of literature including authors, critics, major works, magazines, genres, schools and movements in these regions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. With more than 200 entries written by a team of international contributors, this Encyclopediasuccessfully covers the popular to the esoteric. The Encyclopedia is an invaluable reference resource for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature as well as being of huge interest to those following Spanish or Portuguese language courses.
Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 by Daniel Balderston; Mike Gonzalez
The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 draws together entries on all aspects of literature including authors, critics, major works, magazines, genres, schools and movements in these regions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. With more than 200 entries written by a team of international contributors, this Encyclopedia successfully covers the popular to the esoteric. The Encyclopedianbsp;is an invaluable reference resource for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature as well as being of huge interest to those folowing Spanish or Portuguese language courses.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez : A Critical Companion
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez had already earned tremendous respect and popularity in the years leading up to that honor, and remains, to date, an active and prolific writer. Readers are introduced to Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez with a vivid account of his fascinating life; from his friendships with poets and presidents, to his distinguished career as a journalist, novelist, and chronicler of the quintessential Latin American experience. This companion also helps students situate Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez within the canon of Western literature, exploring his contributions to the modern novel in general, and his forging of literary techniques, particularly magic realism, that have come to distinguish Latin American fiction. Full literary analysis is given for "One Hundred Years of Solitude," as well as "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (1981), "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985), two additional novels, and five of Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez's best short stories. Students are given guidance in understanding the historical contexts, as well as the characters and themes that recur in these interrelated works. Narrative technique and alternative critical perspectives are also explored for each work, helping readers fully appreciate the literary accomplishments of Gabriel Garc DEGREESD'ia M DEGREESD'arquez.
Hispanic Immigrant Literature
Immigration has been one of the basic realities of life for Latino communities in the United States since the nineteenth century. It is one of the most important themes in Hispanic literature, and it has given rise to a specific type of literature while also defining what it means to be Hispanic in the United States. Immigrant literature uses predominantly the language of the homeland; it serves a population united by that language, irrespective of national origin; and it solidifies and furthers national identity. The literature of immigration reflects the reasons for emigrating, records--both orally and in writing--the trials and tribulations of immigration, and facilitates adjustment to the new society while maintaining links with the old society. Based on an archive assembled over the past two decades by author Nicol#65533;s Kanellos's Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, this comprehensive study is one of the first to define this body of work. Written and recorded by people from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, the texts presented here reflect the dualities that have characterized the Hispanic immigrant experience in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, set always against a longing for homeland.
Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater
The Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater provides users with an accessible single-volume reference tool covering Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela). Entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, give succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history. The introduction provides a review of Latin American literature and theater as a whole while separate dictionary entries for each country offer insight into the history of national literatures. Entries for literary terms, movements, and genres serve to complement these commentaries, and an extensive bibliography points the way for further reading. The comprehensive view and detailed information obtained from all these elements will make this book of use to the general-interest reader, Latin American studies students, and the academic specialist.
The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros
In her instantaneously acclaimed work, Sandra Cisneros draws on her own experience as a Mexican-American woman writer facing obstacles in a patriarchal community resistant to change. Compared to the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The House on Mango Street is made up of lyrical passages, interconnected vignettes, and meditations and observations that resemble prose poems. Cisneros's structurally and thematically bold work explores the often-violent coming of age of a young Mexican-American woman. This new title in the Modern Critical Interpretations series analyzes the work through full-length critical essays, and features a bibliography, notes on the contributing writers, a chronology of the author's life, an index, and an introductory essay by esteemed critic Harold Bloom.
Life In Search of Readers : Reading (in) Chicano/a Literature
Since colonial times, Chicano/a literature has varied with the authors' assumptions about the class and gender of their audiences, the linguistic choices available for literary communication, the geographic mobility of writers and readers, and the tastes they may have acquired in Mexico or other countries. In this examination of Chicano/a literature, Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez analyses the ways it connects with and is shaped by the interaction with its audiences. Motivated by a Tomas Rivera essay from 1971, into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature, Martin-Rodriguez began collecting, researching, and examining Chicano/a literature. He soon determined that a work of literature without a reader has no real existence and, specifically, Chicano/a literature has been defined as much by its readers as by its authors. movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the creation of Chicano-owned or controlled publishing enterprises made possible a surge of Chicano/a literature at the national level. He then concentrates on Chicana literature and engendering the reader and on linguistic and marketing strategies for a multicultural readership. Finally, Martin-Rodriguez provides a very thorough list of Chicano/a literature which he studied and he recommends for the reader to consider. About The Author: Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez is director of Hispanic Studies and Graduate Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Texas A&M University, College Station, where he is an associate professor.
Macho Ethics : Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative
Masculinity is not a monolithic phenomenon, but a historically discontinuous one--a fabrication as it were, of given cultural circumstances. Because of its opacity and instability, masculinity, like more recognizable systems of oppression, resists discernibility. In Macho Ethics: Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative, Jason Cortes seeks to reveal the inner workings of masculinity in the narrative prose of four major Caribbean authors: the Cuban Severo Sarduy; the Dominican American Junot Diaz; and the Puerto Ricans Luis Rafael Sanchez and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. By exploring the relationship between ethics and authority, the legacies of colonial violence, the figure of the dictator, the macho, and the dandy, the logic of the Archive, the presence of Oscar Wilde, and notions of trauma and mourning, Macho Ethics fills a gap surrounding issues of power and masculinity within the Caribbean context, and draws attention to what frequently remains invisible and unspoken.
The Magic Curtain : The Mexican-American Border in Fiction, Film, and Song
Borderlands--especially the United States-Mexico borderland--have long served as backgrounds for depicting social instability, according to Thomas Torrans. And borders--or magic curtains--have readily been fashioned into exotic backdrops for films, novels, ballads, and tales in which characters shift easily from one culture to another. The protagonists are equally at home in both societies, or, at worst, at home in neither. True border novels form a literature that deserves a category all its own. There is an uneven quality--a coarseness sometimes mixed with polish, running the gamut of emotion from the tragic to the comic. One recent fictional attempt to exploit the border's historical aspects is Fandango by Ron McCoy (1984), while one of the older efforts is that of the early twentieth-century novelist Will Levington Comfort in Somewhere South in Sonora (1925). Border fiction is often just part of a larger whole and a number of books, whether fiction or nonfiction, seldom if ever cross the magical line between the two cultures. They remain, for the most part, fully centered in either Mexico or the United States, such as J. Frank Dobie's very Texan A Vaquero of the Brush Country or his personalized account of his equestrian travels in northern Mexico, first published as Tongues of the Monte and later as The Mexico I Like. Film epitomizes the escape across the magic curtain. The Getaway (based on the novel by Jim Thompson) is exemplary. Carol and Doc (Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen) not only manage the great escape with a satchel full of stolen money, they do it by fleeing to the border after a long brush with death. Filmmakers have carved movies out of other novels. B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Glendon Swarthout's They Came to Cordura are compelling looks at the vast and hard country that the border stitches together. Fortunately, corridos--the voice of the people--are not dead. They exist far afield, from the ballads created around the life and work of California's César Chávez and the United Farm Workers of America movement to the older songs. Numerous ballads celebrate incidents befalling those running afoul of the law--from bandits to smugglers, large landholders, Texas Rangers, and, inevitably, cattle dealers and rustlers. Still others recount the derring-do of such once well-known figures as Juan Cortina (the "Red Robber of the Rio Grande") and Catarino Garza, dreamers of lost causes and proponents of independent border republics. Corridos also faithfully reflect the latest developments--technology and maquiladoras, for example.
Mexican American Literature : The Politics of Identity
Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historical graphics and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.
Mexican Literature : A History
Mexico has a rich literary heritage that extends back over centuries to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. This major reference work surveys more than five hundred years of Mexican literature from a sociocultural perspective. More than merely a catalog of names and titles, it examines in detail the literary phenomena that constitute Mexico's most significant and original contributions to literature. Recognizing that no one scholar can authoritatively cover so much territory, David William Foster has assembled a group of specialists, some of them younger scholars who write from emerging trends in Latin American and Mexican literary scholarship. The topics they discuss include pre-Columbian indigenous writing (Joanna O'Connell), Colonial literature (Lee H. Dowling), Romanticism (Margarita Vargas), nineteenth-century prose fiction (Mario Martín Flores), Modernism (Bart L. Lewis), major twentieth-century genres (narrative, Lanin A. Gyurko; poetry, Adriana García; theater, Kirsten F. Nigro), the essay (Martin S. Stabb), literary criticism (Daniel Altamiranda), and literary journals (Luis Peña). Each essay offers detailed analysis of significant issues and major texts and includes an annotated bibliography of important critical sources and reference works.
Modernismo Modernity and the Development of Spanish American Literature
Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book Modernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L. Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century. Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works-poetry, narrative, and essays-that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as Rub#65533;n Dar#65533;o, Jos#65533; Mart#65533;, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers. Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.
Modern Latin American Literature
In the 1960s, Latin American literature became known worldwide as never before. Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa all became part of the general culture of educated readers of English, French, German,and Italian. But few know about the literary tradition from which these writers emerged. This Very Short Introduction remedies this situation, providing an overview of modern Latin American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria covers a wide range of topics, discussing the birth of Modernismo, the first Latin American literary movement; how the end of World War I and the Mexican Revolution produced the avant-garde; and how the Cuban Revolution sparked a movement in the novel that came to beknown as the Boom. Within this narrative, the author covers many of the major writers of Latin American literature, from Andres Bello and Jose Maria de Heredia through Borges and Garcia Marquez to Fernando Vallejo and Roberto Bolano.
Reading Junot Diaz
Dominican American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Díaz has gained international fame for his blended, cross-cultural fiction. Reading Junot Díaz is the first study to focus on his complete body of published works. It explores the totality of his work and provides a concise view of the interconnected and multilayered narrative that weaves throughout Díaz's writings. Christopher González analyzes both the formal and thematic features and discusses the work in the context of speculative and global fiction as well as Caribbean and Latino/a culture and language. Topics such as race, masculinity, migration, and Afro-Latinidad are examined in depth. González provides a synthesis of the prevailing critical studies of Díaz and offers many new insights into his work.
The Reptant Eagle : Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel
Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was the most prominent novelist in contemporary Mexico and, until his recent death, one of the leading voices in Latin America's Boom generation. He received the most prestigious awards and prizes in the world, including the Latin Civilization Award (presented by the Presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and France), the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award. During his fecund and accomplished life as a writer, literary theorist, and political analyst, Fuentes turned his attention to the major conflicts of the twentieth century- from the Second World War and the Cuban Revolution, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in Vietnam, and the post-revolutionary crisis of the one-party rule in Mexico - and attended to their political and international importance in his novels, short fiction, and essays. Known for his experimentation in narrative techniques, and for novels and essays written in a global range that illuminate the conflicts of our times, Fuentes's writings have been rightfully translated into most of the world's languages. His literary work continues to spur and provoke the interest of a global readership on diverse civilizations and eras, from Imperial Spain and post-revolutionary France, to Ancient and Modern Mexico, the United States, and Latin America. The Reptant Eagle: Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel includes nineteen essays and one full introduction written exclusively for this volume by renowned Fuentes scholars from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Collected into five parts, the essays integrate wide-ranging methods and innovative readings of The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), Terra Nostra (1975) and, among other novels, Distant Relations (1980); they analyze the visual arts in Fuentes's novels (Diego Rivera's murals and world film); chart and comment on the translations of Fuentes's narratives into Japanese and Romanian; and propose comprehensive readings of The Buried Mirror (1992) and Personas (2012), Fuentes's posthumous book of essays. Beyond their comprehensive and interdisciplinary scope, the book's essays trace Fuentes's conscious resolve to contribute to the art of the novel and to its uninterrupted tradition, from Cervantes and Rabelais to Thomas Mann and Alejo Carpentier, and from the Boom generation to Latin America's "Boomerang" group of younger writers. This book will be of importance to literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in Carlos Fuentes's world-embracing literary work.
Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek
This addition to Rodopi Press¿s Dialogue Series presents a collection of essays solely dedicated to Woman Hollering Creek (1991), Sandra Cisneros¿s groundbreaking collection of short fiction stories and sketches. The emerging and veteran scholars who have contributed to this text approach Cisneros¿s work from varied perspectives, including negotiation of geographic and sociocultural borders, popular and material culture, and gender portrayals. Author dialogues, in which the scholars comment upon each other¿s research, constitute a unique, innovative feature of this particular volume. This book will be of interest to those engaged in Chicano/a literature and feminist/gender studies, as well as instructors of literary critical analysis.
Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia : Conversations with Writers and Artists
Since the 1980s, a prolific "second wave" of Chicano/a writers and artists has tremendously expanded the range of genres and subject matter in Chicano/a literature and art. Building on the pioneering work of their predecessors, whose artistic creations were often tied to political activism and the civil rights struggle, today's Chicano/a writers and artists feel free to focus as much on the aesthetic quality of their work as on its social content. They use novels, short stories, poetry, drama, documentary films, and comic books to shape the raw materials of life into art objects that cause us to participate empathetically in an increasingly complex Chicano/a identity and experience. This book presents far-ranging interviews with twenty-one "second wave" Chicano/a poets, fiction writers, dramatists, documentary filmmakers, and playwrights. Some are mainstream, widely recognized creators, while others work from the margins because of their sexual orientations or their controversial positions. Frederick Luis Aldama draws out the artists and authors on both the aesthetic and the sociopolitical concerns that animate their work. Their conversations delve into such areas as how the artists' or writers' life experiences have molded their work, why they choose to work in certain genres and how they have transformed them, what it means to be Chicano/a in today's pluralistic society, and how Chicano/a identity influences and is influenced by contact with ethnic and racial identities from around the world.
Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas : Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature
Weaving strands of Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas explores political and theoretical agendas, particularly those that undermine the patriarchy, across a diverse range of Latina authors. Within this range, calls for a coalition are clear, but questions surrounding the process of these revolutionary dialogues provide important lines of inquiry. Examining the works of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, Carmen Boullosa, and Helena Mar#65533;a Viramontes, Anna Sandoval considers resistance to traditional cultural symbols and contemporary efforts to counteract negative representations of womanhood in literature and society. Offering a new perspective on the oppositional nature of Latina writers, Sandoval emphasizes the ways in which national literatures have privileged male authors, whose viewpoint is generally distinct from that of women--a point of departure rarely acknowledged in postcolonial theory. Applying her observations to the disciplinary, historical, and spatial facets of literary production, Sandoval interrogates the boundaries of the Latina experience. Building on the dialogues begun with such works as Sonia Saldivar-Hull's Feminism on the Border and Ellen McCracken's New Latina Narrative, this is a concise yet ambitious comparative approach to the historical and cultural connections (as well as disparities) found in Chicana and Mexicana literature.
The Translational Turn : Latinx Literature into the Mainstream
No contemporary development underscores the transnational linkage between the United States and Spanish-language América today more than the wave of in-migration from Spanish-language countries during the 1980s and 1990s. This development, among others, has made clear what has always been true, that the United States is part of Spanish-language América. Translation and oral communication from Spanish to English have been constant phenomena since before the annexation of the Mexican Southwest in 1848. The expanding number of counter-national translations from English to Spanish of Latinx fictional narratives by mainstream presses between the 1990s and 2010 is an indication of significant change in the relationship. A Translational Turn explores both the historical reality of Spanish to English translation and the "new" counter-national English to Spanish translation of Latinx narratives. More than theorizing about translation, this book underscores long-standing contact, such as code-mixing and bi-multilingualism, between the two languages in U.S. language and culture. Although some political groups in this country persist in seeing and representing this country as having a single national tongue and community, the linguistic ecology of both major cities and the suburban periphery, here and in the global world, is bilingualism and multilingualism.