Rebecca Biron breaks new ground in this study of masculinity, violence, and the strategic construction of collective political identities in twentieth-century Latin American fiction. By engaging current sociological, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Murder and Masculinity analyzes the cliche of proving virility through violence against women. Biron develops her argument through close readings of five works: Jorge Luis Borges's -La intrusa, - Armonia Somer's -El despojo, - Clarice Lispector's A Maca no Escuro, Manuel Puig's The Buenos Aires Affair, and Reinaldo Arenas's...

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro's eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad. The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican...

Elena Garro and Mexico's Modern Dreams uses Elena Garro's eccentric life and work as a lens through which to examine mid-twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals' desire to reconcile mexicanidad with modernidad. The famously scandalous first wife of Nobel Prize winner poet Octavio Paz, and an award-winning author in her own right, Garro constructed a mysterious and often contradictory persona through her very public participation in Mexican political conflicts. Herself an anxious and contentious Mexican writer, Elena Garro elicited profound political and aesthetic anxiety in her Mexican...