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In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film, performance art, and multi-media digital texts, among others. The essays provide conceptua...

This is the first book in English on Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay 1878-Argentina 1937), a canonical author whose works are read by all advanced students of Spanish in the US and many other countries. The study examines Quiroga's work through the theoretical lens of the heroic-a lens elaborated in part by means of Quiroga's own disquisitions on the subject-and the complementary phenomenon of the monstrous. This lens serves to elucidate many evidently obscure and self-contradictory aspects of Quiroga'...

Why is the capital of the United States named in part after Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer commissioned by Spain who never set foot on what would become the nation's mainland? Why did Spanish American nationalists in 1819 name a new independent republic ""Colombia,"" after Columbus, the first representative of the empire from which they had recently broken free? These are only two of the introductory questions explored in The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, a fundamen...

This book provides the first look at the dynamic resurgence of Peruvian narrative since the late 1990s. Talk-show host Jaime Bayly's seven novels have scandalized Lima's society with their treatment of homosexuality and haveattracted record sales throughout the Spanish-speaking world with their exciting re-creation of Lima slang and focus on McOndo themes. University lecturer Ivan Thays has vigorously opposed this light narrative by providinga "high" cultural alternative. His three novels have...

The twelve essays in this volume on Latin American women's writing are written from an explicitly theoretical and academic feminist perspective. The contributors - leading female academics working in Latin America, the US, and Europe - rethink notions of gendered and cultural identity and examine the specific discursive practices of a range of female-authored texts. The volume has been designed to appeal to various academic needs. It offers fresh readings of canonized writers, such as Marie Lui...

"Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories" discusses 15 works of Latin-American playwrights. Contributors delineate the artistic lives of women dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century - from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela and highlight the problems inherent in writing under politically repressive governments. They also illustrate through the writers' experiences that gender difference entails both loss and pr...

Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the writer and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

This book offers discussion and analysis of the subtle writing of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez - a traditionalist who draws from classic Western texts, a Modernist committed to modernizing the conservative literary tradition in Colombia and Latin America, an internationally recognized major writer of the 1960s Boom, the key figure in popularizing what has been called "magic realism" and, finally, a Modernist who has occasionally engaged in some ofthe strategies of the postmodern. The...

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels-Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock-that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates them into an American context. Kincaid reli...

This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 're...

Spanning a time period from the era of Conquest and Discovery to late in the twentieth century, this study examines eight Mexican texts that share attributes of the picaresque branch of the family of literature. The book highlights variations in context, narrative technique, style, humor, setting, characterization, and focus. Previously unstudied texts such as El Chanfalla and Don Catrin de la Fachenda as well as Mexican classics El Periquillo Sarniento and La vida inutil de Pito Perez are exami...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Argentina was in the midst of its worst economic crisis in decades, the result of years of drastic neoliberal reforms. This book looks at the way ideas about race and nationhood were conveyed during this period of financial meltdown and national emergency, examining in particular how the neoliberal crisis led to the critical self-questioning of the dominant imaginary of Argentina as homogenously white - allegedly the result of European immigration and the...

Mujeres en transito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamerica (1830-1910) examines in detail the insightful accounts by four prominent female writers who traveled to and from Latin America in the 19th century: the French-Peruvian socialist and activist Flora Tristan (1803-1844), the Argentines Juana Manuela Gorriti (1819-1892) and Eduarda Mansilla (1838-1892), and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909). Each author traveled and wrote in different and significant moments in the hist...