American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography
2 primary works
Book 1
Cuba's Wild East: A Literary Geography of Oriente recounts a literary history of modern Cuba that has four distinctive and interrelated characteristics. Oriented to the east of the island, it looks aslant at a Cuban national literature that has sometimes been indistinguishable from a history of Havana. Given the insurgent and revolutionary history of that eastern region, it recounts stories of rebellion, heroism, and sacrifice. Intimately related to places and sites which now belong to a national pantheon, its corpus-while including fiction and poetry-is frequently written as memoir and testimony. As a region of encounter, that corpus is itself resolutely mixed, featuring a significant proportion of writings by US journalists and novelists as well as by Cuban writers.
Book 7
The Dinner at Gonfarone's is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomon de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Diaz and Julia Alvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated.
De la Selva's range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva's own poetry - his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection - The Dinner at Gonfarone's highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Ruben Dario, Jose Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramon Jimenez, all of whom were part of de la Selva's extensive network.
De la Selva's range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva's own poetry - his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection - The Dinner at Gonfarone's highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Ruben Dario, Jose Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramon Jimenez, all of whom were part of de la Selva's extensive network.