Too often literary criticism is academic exercise rather than creative act. For the multifaceted Julio Ortega—respected poet, dramatist, and novelist in his own right—the act of criticism becomes profoundly creative, his incisive readings of the text far transcending the pedantry that may falsely pass for imagination, intelligence, and rigor. Nearly every Spanish-American writer of consequence, from Paz to Fuentes, Cortázar to Lezama Lima, has extolled Ortega’s criticism as not merely a reflection but an essential part of the renaissance that took place in Spanish-American letters during the late twentieth century.

Poetics of Change brings together Ortega’s most penetrating and insightful analyses of the fiction of Borges, Fuentes, García Márquez, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cabrera Infante, and others responsible for great writing from Spanish America. Ortega concerns himself most with the semantic innovations of these masters of the modern narrative and their play with form, language, and the traditional boundaries of genre. Mapping their creative territory, he finds that the poetics of Spanish-American writing is that of a dynamically changing genre that has set exploration at its very heart.

Julio Ortega has been called “Peru’s leading literary intellectual” (American Book Review). He is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University and has published many works of his own fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as numerous critical editions and works of literary criticism.

• Acknowledgments
• I. A Critical Model
• 1. The New Spanish-American Narrative
• 2. The First Letter
• 3. Borges and the Latin-American Text
• 4. Pedro Páramo
• 5. Hopscotch
• 6. Morelli on the Threshold
• 7. Reading Paradiso
• 8. One Hundred Years of Solitude
• 9. The Autumn of the Patriarch: Text and Culture
• II. The Site of the Text
• 10. The Site of the Text
• 11. Explosion in a Cathedral
• 12. A Change of Skin
• 13. Three Trapped Tigers
• 14. From Cuba with a Song
• 15. On the Text of History
• 16. A Book on Death
• Index of Names