ABOUT THIS BOOK

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

BRANTLEY NICHOLSON is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Georgia College in Milledgeville. His research and teaching take up comparative-American studies and the theoretical questions of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and economics. His recent research has focused on post-national imaginaries in Chile and Colombia and the emergence of new global cities in the Andean region, such as Santiago, Bogotá, and Medellín.

REVIEWS

"The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon."

— Camilo Malagón, assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College

"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability."

— Gene Bell-Villada, editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez

“El profesor B. Nicholson, conocedor como pocos de la Colombia profunda y escindida, ha logrado adentrarse en The Aesthetic Border: Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization, con sagacidad investigadora, en los repliegues de la historia reciente que viene desde el asesinato del líder liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (El Bogotazo, 1948) y sus impensables consecuencias políticas partidistas de las que todavía no se ha recuperado el país.”— Hispania

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface & Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Gabo Against the World: Gabriel García Márquez and the Poetics of Early Globalization
2. Literary Shipwrecks: Colombian Aesthetic Citizenship after García Márquez
3. Narrating Disruption: From the Novela de la Violencia to the Narco-novela
4. Recasting the Colombian National Story after the Inrush of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index