Books

The First Thorough Examination of the Enduring Significance of Plants in Spanish American Literature and Culture

A Study of the Twenty-First-Century Latin American Novel in an Era of Apocalyptic Catastrophe

Highlights the Transformative Effects of Border Conflicts on Culture and Politics

An Original Intervention into Theorizations of Buenos Aires’s Urban History

Reveals a New Story of Unexpected Sympathies, Solidarities, and Care in the Guantánamo Borderlands

Fills the Gaps of an Important Modernist Brazilian Writer’s Early Career and Illuminates Recurring Themes of His Later Works

Charts the Rise of the Barrios in the Venezuelan Imagination

Presents a New Way of Understanding Modernization, Exclusion, and Nationalist Discourse through the Voices of Gender and Sexual Dissident Writers

This book introduces to a larger audience the work of a group of Mexican writers whose work reflects the stimulus of the “boom” of the 1960s, especially in the experimental nueva novella.Duncan views the work of six writers in the context of more well known writers of the period (Ruflo, Fuentes, and Del Paso), and concludes with a chapter on other recent innovators in Mexican literature.

An intellectual tour de force from one of today’s leading critics of Latin American literature and culture, The Corpus Delicti [The Body of Crime] is a manual of crime, a compendium of crime tales, and an extended meditation on the role of crime in life.

Examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s, with particular focus on Roberto Arlt and Mario de Andrade. The movement developed on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with European movements, critiquing modernity itself, and developed a geopolitical awareness that bridged postcolonial and postmodern culture and continues its influence today.

Legras views the factors that have both formed and stifled the integration of peripheral experiences into Latin American literature. He analyzes key works by novelists Juan Jose Saer (The Witness), Nellie Campobello (Cartucho), Roa Bastos (Son of Man), and Jose Maria Arguedas (The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below), among others, to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the plight of the author, the peripheral voice, and the confines of the literary medium.

Repositions Peruvian indigenismo as a discourse of and about modernity, in which the movement’s artists and intellectuals used the figure of the Indian to mobilize larger questions about becoming modern.

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony’s residents followed Antonio Conselheiro, who promoted a communal existence free from taxes and oppression. Estimates of the death toll range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this event. In her study, Johnson views the process of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sert›es, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been “sentenced” to history by this work.

Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the “opening” of prisons to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in postdictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, she examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures.