Presenting and interrogating an array of texts and discourses, this collection brings into focus a broad range of topics whose common denominator is the intersection between cultural productions and politics in different moments of the history of Latin America and Spain. From the struggles of class distinction, identity and community in 19th and 20th century and contemporary Latin America as explored in photography, literature and film, to how political and sexual transgressions from medieval times to the present are portrayed in Hispanic literature, and the ways that canonical and non-canonical texts in Spain have been defying hegemonic power relations in the 20th century and beyond. This volume provides fresh approaches from well-established scholars, as well as from a new generation of researchers whose works enlighten the reader about the rich facets of such intersections. This publication also offers a background to pursue further research in these areas and to serve the general public interested in Latin American and Spanish literary and cultural studies, and those seeking a greater understanding of social and economic change in both Latin America and Spain: specifically, issues of inclusion and citizenship; the constraints on state power in the neoliberal era; the strategies used by texts to create subjects that are not bound to conventional identity formations; and the challenges and possibilities of subverting the gaze of the institutional spectator.

"Offers an array of disciplinary views on how theories of globalization and an emerging postnational critical imagination have impacted traditional ways of thinking about literature."--Samuel Amago, author of Spanish Cinema in the Global Context: Film on Film Moving beyond the traditional study of Hispanic literature on a nation-by-nation basis, this volume explores how globalization is currently affecting Spanish and Latin American fiction, poetry, and literary theory. Taking a postnational approach, contributors examine works by José Martí, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Junot Díaz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers. They discuss how expanding worldviews have impacted the way these authors write and how they are read today. Whether analyzing the increasingly popular character of the voluntary exile, the theme of masculinity in This Is How You Lose Her, or the multilingual nature of the Spanish language itself, they show how contemporary Hispanic writers and critics are engaging in cross-cultural literary conversations. Drawing from a range of fields including postcolonial, Latino, gender, exile, and transatlantic studies, these essays help characterize a new "world" literature that reflects changing understandings of memory, belonging, and identity.

"A reference work containing 54 entries defining and explaining generally accepted cultural studies terms as well as those specific to the study of Latin American culture"--

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms brings together a team of expert contributors in this critical and innovative volume. Highlighting key trends within the discipline, as well as cutting-edge viewpoints that revise and redefine traditional debates and approaches, readers will come away with an understanding of the complexity of twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production and with a renovated and eminently contemporary understanding of twentieth-century literature and culture. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and academics in the fields of Latin American literature, cultural studies, and comparative literature.

Literature and "Interregnum" examines the unraveling of the political forms of modernity through readings of end-of-millennium literary texts by César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, Sergio Chejfec, Diamela Eltit, and Roberto Bolaño. The opening of national spaces to the global capitalist system in the 1980s culminates in the suspension of key principles of modernity, most notably that of political sovereignty. While the neoliberal model subjugates modern forms of social organization and political decision making to an economic rationale, the market is unable to provide a new ordering principle that could fill the empty place formerly occupied by the national figure of the sovereign. The result is a situation that resembles what the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci termed "interregnum," an in-between time in which "the old [order] is dying and the new cannot be born." The recoding of history as literary form provides occasions for reconsidering modern conceptualizations of aesthetic experience, mood, temporality, thought, politics, ethical experience, as well as of literature itself as social institution. In his analysis, Patrick Dove seeks to create dialogues between literature and theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy, political thought, psychoanalysis, and sociology of globalization. The author highlights the connections between mass media, technology, politics, and economics.

In this masterful experiment in truly comparative literary criticism, Alfred J. Mac Adam establishes Latin America's place in the Western literary tradition. By juxtaposing Latin American and Anglo-American texts, he shows how Latin American literature has gone beyond the context of Hispanic letters to borrow from, exploit, and finally extend the Western tradition. Mac Adam describes the changes that have taken place in Latin American literature since the time of Modernismo (roughly 1880-1920), when Spanish American writers tried to update their literary language by imitating foreign, mostly French, literature. Since then, as he demonstrates, Latin American writing has achieved a pioneering status by means of a different kind of imitation—parody—whereby it gives back to the former centers of Western culture their own writing, now distorted and reshaped into something new.

This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.

Providing an extensive introduction to cultural studies in general, regardless of chronological or geographic focus, and presenting provocative, essential readings from Latin American writers of the last two centuries, Reframing Latin America brings much-needed accessibility to the concepts of cultural studies and postmodernism. From Saussure to semiotics, the authors begin by demystifying terminology, then guide readers through five identity constructs, including nation, race, and gender. The readings that follow are presented with insightful commentary and encompass such themes as "Civilized Folk Marry the Barbarians" (including José Martí's "Our America") and "Boom Goes the Literature: Magical Realism as the True Latin America?" (featuring Elena Garro's essay "It's the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas"). Films such as Like Water for Chocolate are discussed in-depth as well. The result is a lively, interdisciplinary guide for theorists and novices alike.