front cover of From Eves Rib
From Eves Rib
Gioconda Belli
Northwestern University Press, 1989
Gioconda Belli's poetry, widely published and revered in Latin America and Europe, celebrates the longing for a society in which humanity constructs its future, animated by an inextinguishable erotic, maternal, and transcentendly loving desire. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his book, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, her poetry is "a kind of public love poetry that comes closer to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I [have] yet heard."
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front cover of The Inhabited Woman
The Inhabited Woman
Gioconda Belli; Translated by Kathleen March
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
Lavinia is The Inhabited Woman: accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act.

The Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.
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front cover of The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
Edited by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes
Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow.

The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

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Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
Laura Barbas-Rhoden
Ohio University Press, 2003

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?

Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures. Laura Barbas-Rhoden winds a common thread in the literary imaginations of Claribel Alegría, Rosario Aguilar, Gioconda Belli, and Tatiana Lobo and shows how these writers offer provocative supplements to the historical record.

Writing Women in Central America considers more than a dozen narratives in which the authors craft their own interpretations of history to make room for women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans. Some of the texts reveal silences in the narratives of empire- and nation-building. Others reinterpret events to highlight the struggle of marginalized peoples for dignity and humanity in the face of oppression. All confront the ways in which stories have been told about the past.

Yet ultimately, Professor Barbas-Rhoden asserts, all concern the present and the future. As seen in Writing Women in Central America, though their fictions are historical, the writers direct their readers beyond the present toward a more just future for all who live in Central America.

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