Book contents
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980
- Latin American Literature in Transition
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I War, Revolution, Dictatorship
- Chapter 1 Revolutions and Literary Transitions
- Chapter 2 Jorge Luis Borges
- Chapter 3 Anti-Fascism and Literature in Brazil
- Chapter 4 Disaster Innovation in the Mid-century Spanish American Novel
- Chapter 5 Struggle at the Margins
- Part II Metropolis and Ruins
- Part III Solidarity
- Part IV Aesthetics and Innovation
- Index
- References
Chapter 4 - Disaster Innovation in the Mid-century Spanish American Novel
Carpentier, Asturias, Donoso
from Part I - War, Revolution, Dictatorship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2023
Book contents
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980
- Latin American Literature in Transition
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I War, Revolution, Dictatorship
- Chapter 1 Revolutions and Literary Transitions
- Chapter 2 Jorge Luis Borges
- Chapter 3 Anti-Fascism and Literature in Brazil
- Chapter 4 Disaster Innovation in the Mid-century Spanish American Novel
- Chapter 5 Struggle at the Margins
- Part II Metropolis and Ruins
- Part III Solidarity
- Part IV Aesthetics and Innovation
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter refutes the reading of midcentury Spanish American novels as transitional works that prepared the ground for Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Invoking the disaster theories of Thomas Homer-Dixon and Naomi Klein, the chapter reads Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) and Miguel ángel Asturias’s Mulata de tal (Mulata, 1963) as responses, respectively, to the disasters of the Spanish Civil War and the 1954 military coup in Guatemala. Extending this reading to one of the culminating works of the Boom, the conclusion continues this rupturing of the chronology of transition by analyzing José Donoso’s novel El jardin de al lado (The Garden Next Door, 1981) as a response to the 1973 military coup in Chile. These novels’ technical innovations are interpreted as personal reactions to dire circumstances, usually at about a decade’s distance from the event, rather than as components of an arc of self-conscious, collective literary development. Transition, therefore, becomes more arbitrary, and more personal, than most literary histories portray it as being.
Keywords
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- Information
- Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980 , pp. 65 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
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