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3 books match the query 'Historical fiction, Spanish American'

cover of History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

History and Memory in the Two Souths

Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction

Deborah Cohn

Vanderbilt University Press, 1999

It is commonplace among literary critics to refer to William Faulkner's influence on Spanish American literature. Yet few studies have delved seriously into why the attraction of the writings of this southerner has been so powerful. In this bold new study, Deborah N. Cohn addresses this question squarely, from two perspectives.


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.

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cover of Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World

Latin American Novels of the Conquest

Reinventing the New World

Kimberle S. López

University of Missouri Press, 2002

As the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage was approaching, Latin American authors vied to finish novels rewriting the conquest in order to have them published in the years surrounding 1992. Surprisingly, few of these novels attempted to reconstruct the indigenous perspective on this historical moment, focusing instead on representing the European conquerors. In Latin American Novels of the Conquest, Kimberle López focuses on five of these works: Juan José Saer’s El entenado; Herminio Martínez’s Diario maldito de Nuño de Guzmán; Abel Posse’s El largo atardecer del caminante; and Homero Aridjis’s 1492: Vida y tiempos de Juan Cabezón de Castilla and Memorias del Nuevo Mundo. She utilizes these books to explore how their authors represented the conquest from the fictionalized perspective of the conquistador, ultimately deconstructing the rhetoric of empire through the representation of a simultaneous fascination and aversion between the colonizer and colonized.
The fictionalized explorers and conquistadors represented in this corpus all identify with certain aspects of Amerindian culture—significantly, those elements that are most distinct from European culture, such as cannibalism and human sacrifice—but also feel the need to distance themselves from these “others” in order to protect their own European cultural identity. In most cases, the conquistadors themselves are represented as outsiders within the enterprise of imperialism, due to ethnic, religious, or sexual differences from the norm. This representation turns the gaze inward toward the “other” within European culture, underscoring the complex origins of Latin American cultures in the violent encounter between the Amerindians and the conquistadors.
            By examining these issues, Lopéz’s Latin American Novels of the Conquest illuminates the ways in which Latin American novelists used their literary imaginations to embody their ambivalence regarding their own transcultural heritage as children of both the colonized and the colonizer.
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cover of Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America

Pirate Novels

Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America

Nina Gerassi-Navarro

Duke University Press, 1999

In Pirate Novels Nina Gerassi-Navarro examines an overlooked genre to reveal how history and fiction blend to address important isuses of nation building in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In the figure of the pirate, bold and heroic to some, cruel and criminal to others, she reveals an almost ideal character that came to embody the spirit of emerging nationhood and the violence associated with the struggle to attain it.
Beginning with an overview of the history of piracy, Gerassi-Navarro traces the historical icon of the pirate through colonial-era chronicles before exploring a group of nineteenth-century Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine novels. She argues that the authors of these novels, in their reconstructions of the past, were less interested in accurate representations than in using their narratives to discuss the future of their own countries. In reading these pirate narratives as metaphors for the process of nation building in Spanish America, Gerassi-Navarro exposes the conflicting strains of a complex culture attempting to shape that future. She shows how these pirate stories reflect the on-going debates that marked the consolidation of nationhood, as well as the extent to which the narratives of national identity in Spanish America are structured in relation to European cultures, and the ways in which questions of race and gender were addressed.
Providing new readings of the cultural and political paradigms that marked the literary production of nineteenth-century Spanish America, Pirate Novels uniquely expands the range of texts usually examined in the study of nation-building. It will interest literary scholars generally as well as those engaged in Latin American, colonial, and postcolonial studies.
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