The vision of the South American rainforest as a wilderness of rank decay, poisonous insects, and bloodthirsty 'savages'' in the Spanish American novela de la selva has often been interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. This book offers a new reading of the genre by arguing that, far from being derivative, the novela de la selva re-imagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective, redefining tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perceptions of Amazonia in fictional and factual travel writing. With particular...
The vision of the South American rainforest as a wilderness of rank decay, poisonous insects, and bloodthirsty 'savages'' in the Spanish American nove...
