Book contents
- A History of Argentine Literature
- A History of Argentine Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editors’ Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Dates
- Chapter 1 1536: The Creation of a Literary Space
- Chapter 2 1810: Patriotic Voices
- Chapter 3 1837: The Foundation of a National Literature
- Chapter 4 1884: A Literary Field in Formation
- Chapter 5 1910: A Modern Lettered City
- Chapter 6 1926: Traditions Old and New
- Chapter 7 1948: Culture and the State
- Chapter 8 1963: Experimentation and the Common Reader
- Chapter 9 1980: Memory and the Novel
- Chapter 10 2001: Argentine Narrative in the New Millennium
- Part II Critical Inroads
- Part III Literary Names
- Index
- References
Chapter 8 - 1963: Experimentation and the Common Reader
from Part I - Literary Dates
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024
- A History of Argentine Literature
- A History of Argentine Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editors’ Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Literary Dates
- Chapter 1 1536: The Creation of a Literary Space
- Chapter 2 1810: Patriotic Voices
- Chapter 3 1837: The Foundation of a National Literature
- Chapter 4 1884: A Literary Field in Formation
- Chapter 5 1910: A Modern Lettered City
- Chapter 6 1926: Traditions Old and New
- Chapter 7 1948: Culture and the State
- Chapter 8 1963: Experimentation and the Common Reader
- Chapter 9 1980: Memory and the Novel
- Chapter 10 2001: Argentine Narrative in the New Millennium
- Part II Critical Inroads
- Part III Literary Names
- Index
- References
Summary
The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.
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- A History of Argentine Literature , pp. 112 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024