The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has more recently given way to a stronger recognition of the transatlantic roots of much Spanish-American literature. This indebtedness does not imply subservience; rather, the New World's cultural and literary autonomy lies in the distinctive ways in which it assimilated its cultural inheritance. Professor Perez Firmat explores this process of assimilation or transculturation in the case of Cuba, and proposes a new understanding of the issue of Cuban...
The sense of the radical newness of Spanish America found in literary works from the chronicles of the conquest to the work of the criollistas has mor...
This volume takes an important step toward the discovery of a common critical heritage that joins the diverse literatures of North America and Latin America. Traditionally, literary criticism has treated the literature of the Americas as "New World" literature, examining it in relation to its "Old World"--usually European--counterparts. This collection of essays redirects the Eurocentric focus of earlier scholarship and identifies a distinctive pan-American consciousness. The essays here place the literature of the Americas in a hemispheric context by drawing on approaches derived from...
This volume takes an important step toward the discovery of a common critical heritage that joins the diverse literatures of North America and Latin A...
An acclaimed poet and critic presents an affectionate examination of Cuba in America's cultural imagination. "This short, breezy, and often amusing examination of American perceptions of Cuba is both timely and informative. . . . Perez Firmat has handled this topic with a light, humorous touch without diminishing its more serious aspects."-Jay Freeman, Booklist "Mr. Perez Firmat catalogs the ways in which Cuba has influenced American tastes and infiltrated American culture . . . to suggest the pride of place Havana once had in the American imagination."-Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal "A...
An acclaimed poet and critic presents an affectionate examination of Cuba in America's cultural imagination. "This short, breezy, and often amusing ex...
The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacation or parenthetical insertion--in what was perceived as the established course of the modern Hispanic novel's development. Yet, as Perez Firmat argues, though this genre saw itself as recreative and interstitial, it deliberately precipitated "a class war not between social classes but between literary classes." Concentrating on source material not widely available, Perez Firmat reconstructs the reception these novels received at the time of...
The "idle fictions" of the vanguard novel of the 1920s and 1930s in Spain and Spanish America represented a kind of interlude of playfulness--a vacati...
