Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - Spanish & Portuguese

Writing and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day.

In this masterful study, Anibal Gonzalez traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own...

Mexican women writers have moved to the forefront of their country's literature in the twentieth century. Among those who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s are Maria Luisa Puga, Silvia Molina, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Angeles Mastretta. Sharing a range of affinities while maintaining distinctive voices and outlooks, these are the women whom Gabriella de Beer has chosen to profile in Contemporary Mexican Women Writers.

De Beer takes a three-part approach to each writer. She opens with an essay that explores the writer's apprenticeship and discusses her...

The student massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, marked the beginning of an era of rapid social change in Mexico. In this illuminating study, Cynthia Steele explores how the writers of the next two decades responded to the massacre and to the social crisis it signaled in terms of political change and gender identity.

Elena Poniatowska is one of Latin America's most distinguished and innovative living writers. Advocacy of women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, denunciation of the repression of that struggle, and a tendency to blur the boundaries between conventional literary forms characterize her writing practice.

Asserting that Poniatowska's writing has been uniquely shaped by her experience as a journalist and interviewer, Beth Jorgensen addresses four important texts: Palabras cruzadas (interviews), Hasta no verte Jesus mio (testimonial...

Driven by an unfulfilled desire for the unattainable, ultimately indefinable Other, the protagonists of the novels and stories of acclaimed Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector exemplify and humanize many of the issues central to poststructuralist thought, from the nature of language, truth, and meaning to the unstable relationships between language, being, and reality. In this book, Earl Fitz demonstrates that, in turn, poststructuralism offers important and revealing insights into all aspects of Lispector's writing, including her style, sense of structure, characters, themes, and...

In "Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America," Richard L. Jackson explores literary Americanism through writings of black Hispanic authors such as Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Quince Duncan, and Nelson Estupinan Bass that in many ways provide a microcosm for the larger literature. Jackson traces the roots of Afro-Hispanic literature from the early twentieth-century Afrocriollo movement--the Harlem Renaissance of Latin America--to the fiction and criticism of black Latin Americans today. Black humanism arose from Afro-Hispanics' self-discovery of their own humanity and the realization...

The marriage of philosophy and fiction in the first third of Spain's twentieth century was a fertile one. It produced some truly notable offspring -- novels that cross genre boundaries to find innovative forms, and treatises that fuse literature and philosophy in new ways. In her illuminating interdisciplinary study of Spanish fiction of the "Silver Age," Roberta Johnson places this important body of Spanish literature in context through a synthesis of social, literary, and philosophical history.

Her examination of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorin, Ramon Perez de...