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First, Cohn proposes that Faulkner's appeal derives from Spanish American authors' perception of similarities between the South's history and the experiences of their own respective nations. She delineates historical experiences common to the South and Spanish America, including civil wars, defeat and dispossession, regional marginalization, and socio-economic hardship. She also suggests that Spanish American authors found in Faulkner a set of concerns with which they could identify and that, as a result, they were inspired to take up the stylistic innovations characteristic of his writing. The resulting assimilation and adaptation of Euro-American modernism through Faulkner has been an indispensable part of what is known as la nueva narrativa, "the new narrative," as well as of successive movements in Spanish American literature.

From another perspective, Cohn's book shows points of contact between works by other southern and Spanish American novelists without positing relations of influence. Specifically, after identifying common, recurrent themes in modern southern and Spanish American literature in general, Cohn reveals levels of a shared understanding of regional history in Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa, in Ralph Ellison and Isabel Allende, as well as in Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Rulfo. Her analyses compare and contrast these authors' shared attempts to provide correctives to official, mainstream historical discourse through alternate, parallel strategies for reconstructing, recording, and reclaiming the past.

In yoking together the South and Spanish America as neighboring spaces with similar personalities, Cohn advances a daring and controversial thesis that both narrows and enhances the frame of comparison between the literatures of the South and Spanish America.

This book analyzes narratives of hospitality (and inhospitality) through recent crises like climate change and mass displacement. 

Current historical and political issues, such as the refugee crisis and climate emergency, are deeply intertwined with notions, images, and narratives of (in)hospitality. Departing from seminal works, such as those by Kant and Derrida, on this topic, the chapters in this volume examine how new postcolonial, gender, environmental, and medical perspectives reshape current approaches to hospitality in literature, culture, and the arts.

Through a comparison of case studies in multiple national settings, Hosts, Hospitals and Hospitalities shows how the concept of hospitality shapes the way in which we relate with “the Other” in diverse—and ever-evolving—cultural, political, social, and environmental contexts. By examining the issue of hospitality from a post-pandemic standpoint, which revised the roles of our private and public spaces in the aftermath of COVID-19, by dwelling on novel issues of climate emergency, and by focusing on current developments in terms of migration and displacement, this book adds new light and significant theoretical and methodological perspectives to previous debates about hospitality.