Latin American Literature
Latin American literature encompasses the literary works produced in the countries of Latin America, including novels, poetry, essays, and plays. It reflects the diverse cultural, historical, and social experiences of the region, often addressing themes such as identity, colonialism, and social justice. Notable authors include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Julio Cortazar.
5 Key excerpts on "Latin American Literature"
eBook - ePub- Philip Swanson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Latin American Literatures Elzbieta Sklodowska The remarkably vast and diverse domain of the literatures of Latin America does not lend itself to easy overviews. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify a variety of criss-crossing movements, tropes and categories that link the literary production of the region (Mexico, Central America, Hispanic Caribbean islands, South America, including Portuguese-speaking Brazil). At the same time, the stylistic and thematic coordinates shared by national literatures – such as common language, artistic movements, colonial legacy and the nation-building experiences of the nineteenth century – should not let us de-emphasize regional differences, nor should they obliterate diverse creative expressions of indigenous people. Large portions of South and Central America (the Andean region, Mexico, Guatemala, Paraguay) continue to be influenced by the legacy of the great pre-Colombian cultures of the Inca, the Aymara, the Nahua, the Maya and the Guaraní. On the other hand, the African-based cultures of the enslaved have undergone a violent ‘hybridization’ or ‘transculturation’ with European elements in the crucible of plantation economy in Brazil and the Hispanic Caribbean. Finally, various countries of South America (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) have been most significantly shaped by European immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To provide a meaningful picture of Latin American Literatures means to recognize all facets of its richness and diversity, including the works of women writers and the growing literary output of Latino/a authors in the USA...
- Verity Smith, Verity Smith(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...L Land and Literature The identification with a specific geographic space is the main component of the identity of a community. In the case of Latin American countries, the land between the Straight of Magellan and the Mexican border with the US, has been the focus of its most significant writers in marking their American difference. The Argentine pampa, the jungles of Central America and Brazil, the Andes in Chile, Peru and Bolivia, the Amazon river, or the coffee and banana plantations of Colombia have figured prominently in the works of Spanish American writers, who have endowed nature with a range of significances and created symbolic landscapes. The land connected to literature depends on the perspective, or the “gaze” of the author who depicts it: it can be observed from outside or from inside, as the Other to be dominated by the western subject, or as the source of life to be protected from the barbarism of civilization. The first texts by Europeans about Latin American land are written by 16th-century travellers: outsiders who are impressed by the landscape and depict it as a new place to be possessed, as in the texts by Christopher Columbus. During the colonial period, travellers, missionaries and conquerors centered their writing in the American land. Among these are Bernardo de Balbuena, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan de Castellanos, Pedro de Oña, Juan de Ercilla, Sebastiáo da Rocha Pita, and Conceives Días. However, the Venezuelan humanist Andrés Bello is considered the first Latin American author to transform the land into literature from an insider’s view in his poems, La agricultura de la zona tórrida [The Agriculture of the Torrid Zone] and América...
- David William Foster(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A general survey of Latin American poetry in terms of five basic moments: enunciation, revelation, suggestion, dissociation, and identification. Rojo, Grinor. Orígenes del teatro hispanoamericano contemporáneo. Valparaíso: Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 1972. Developments in contemporary Latin American theater are examined, with emphasis on the assimilation of European models. Sánchez, Luis Alberto. Historia comparada de las literaturas americanas. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1973-76. The purpose of this study is to consider the unity of Latin American literary expression; organization is historical. Sánchez, Luis Alberto. Proceso y contenido de la novela hispano-americana. Madrid: Gredos, 1968. The generic and thematic processes underlying the evolution of the Spanish American novel are examined: generic in terms of the relationship between the Latin American novel and the novel of Spain and other countries and thematic in the sense of general issues dealt with. Schwartz, Ronald. Nomads, Exiles & Emigres: the Rebirth of the Latin American Narrative 1960-80. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1980. Ten major authors of the 1960s and 1970s are examined. Shaw, Donald L. Nueva narrativa hispanoamericana. Madrid: Cátedra, 1981. A general survey of Spanish American fiction since the 1940s is provided, with emphasis on how, despite the significant ideological and stylistic diversity of the works, the genre may continue to be studied as a global phenomenon. Solórzano, Carlos. El teatro latinoamericano en el siglo XX. México, D.F.: Pomarca, 1964. A general panorama of developments in the contemporary Latin American theater. Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: the National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991...
eBook - ePubDocuments in Crisis
Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico
- Beth E. Jörgensen(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...Ermilo Abreu Gómez's anthology Cuatro siglos de literatura mexicana published in 1946 divides its selections by genre and by century, such that poetry, theater, novel, short story, and relato (account, story, or tale) are treated in chronological order from the colonial period to the 1940s. Surprisingly, the chronicle of the conquest is excluded entirely, but under “relatos” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries one finds some narrative nonfiction in the forms of biography and memoir. José Luis Martínez's history Literatura mexicana, siglo XX, 1910–1949 (published in 1949), also organizes its material according to the traditional genres, but he includes a miscellaneous category of “Varios” where he curiously accommodates indigenous literature and writing by women. Finally, the extensive Mexican Literature: A History (1994) edited by David William Foster opens the door to significant examples of nonfiction in the chapter on the colonial period, in which a discussion of historical writings, legal documents, and ethnographic compilations predominates. The chapters on Romanticism, realism, Modernismo, and literature of the twentieth century, however, overlook such nonfiction forms as essay, chronicle, and autobiography in favor of a focus on the novel, poetry, and theater. Nevertheless, Mexican literature since the colonial period contains a wealth of well-known and influential texts produced in dialogue with the traditional fact-based genres of autobiography, biography, chronicle, essay, ethnography, memoir, testimony, and travel writing. These works acknowledge the conventions of nonfiction writing as it is constituted in Western culture both by conforming to established expectations and by challenging and stretching their limits...
eBook - ePubGlobal Modernists on Modernism
An Anthology
- Alys Moody, Stephen J. Ross, Alys Moody, Stephen J. Ross(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...CHAPTER ONE Modernism in Latin America EDITED BY CAMILLA SUTHERLAND One of the first problems when talking about modernism in Latin America is terminological: depending on the context, the Spanish and Portuguese term modernismo can refer to two very distinct moments of cultural production in the region. In Spanish America, modernismo refers to a fin de siècle literary movement spearheaded by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and characterized by its engagement with European Parnassianism and Symbolism. In the Brazilian context, however, modernismo designates the period of fervent artistic innovation that emerged out of the groundbreaking São Paulo Week of Modern Art of 1922. Within these same early decades of the twentieth century, we see a comparable moment of cultural innovation develop in Spanish America, but taking into account the extent to which these writers and artists were directly working against the perceived excesses and Europhilia of Spanish-American modernismo, the term “vanguard” is preferred among practitioners of the time and in subsequent scholarly accounts. The works of Spanish-American vanguardism and Brazilian modernismo most closely align with modernism as understood within the English-speaking world. I will therefore use the terms modernism and modernist (alongside vanguard and avant-garde) in their English usage to refer to the period of cultural production of both Spanish America and Brazil in the early part of the twentieth century. These modernist movements flourished in Latin America’s major cities—Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, and Havana—predominantly between 1920 and 1945. This historical moment saw issues of national identity take center stage within both the political and artistic spheres of Latin America, with widespread efforts being made to identify and consolidate unique national, and also continental, forms of cultural expression...
