By one of the most original and learned critical voices in Hispanic studies-- a timely and ambitious study of authority as theme and authority as authorial strategy in modern Latin American literature.

An ideology is implicit in modern Latin American literature, argues Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, through which both the literature itself and criticism of it define what Latin American literature is and how it ought to be read. In the works themselves this ideology is constantly subjected to a radical critique, and that critique renders the ideology productive and in a sense is what...