This volume celebrates Wilson Harris’s eightieth birthday and more than fifty years of creative writing. The most original and profound writer of the Caribbean, he has revolutionized the art of fiction and its language. He has himself contributed to this volume, and several Caribbean writers of a younger generation – Cyril Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Andrew Jefferson-Miles, Mark McWatt, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott – pay tribute here to his genius. The essays are by critics from the Caribbean, Britain, the United States and continental Europe who have long admired and explored his work. They cover the various genres of Harris’s writing, his poetry, fiction and criticism, and deal with major aspects of his work, bringing out its relevance to the contemporary context of violence in the world, its modernity, and its contribution to the renewal of the humanities.

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 reference to the four emblematic novels of the genre – W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions [1904], José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine [1924], Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima [1935], and Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos [1953] – the book explores how writers throughout post-independence Latin America turned to the jungle as a locus for the contestation of both national and literary identity, harnessing the superabundant tropical vegetation and native myths and customs to forge a descriptive vocabulary which emphatically departed from the reductive categories of European travel writing. Despite being one of the most significant examples of postcolonial literature to emerge from Latin America in the twentieth century, the novela de la selva has, to date, received little critical attention: this book returns a seminal genre of Latin American literature to the centre of contemporary debates about postcolonial identity, travel writing, and imperial landscape aesthetics.

Ambassador William Luers takes us on a fascinating journey from Springfield, Illinois, to Naples, Moscow, Washington DC, Venezuela, and Czechoslovakia, and then to his presidency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, adventures in Cuba, and thereafter. In his revelatory memoir Uncommon Company, William Luers shares stories of his incredible career as a US diplomat to European and Latin American nations, where he introduced art and culture to forge common ground and community, improving the lives of citizens in many countries closed to Western ideas. From touring the Soviet Union with playwright Edward Albee in the 1960s to bringing such famous writers and artists as John Updike, Arthur Miller, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, Francine du Plessix Gray, Richard Diebenkorn, and Frank Stella to Venezuela and Prague during his ambassadorships in Venezuela and Czechoslovakia, Bill Luers’ practice of cultural diplomacy became known as his ability to wield “soft power” that strengthened US relationships wherever he served. After more than thirty years with the State Department, Luers brought his art expertise to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as its president, where he secured the Annenberg Collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by such masters as Van Gogh, Picasso, and Cézanne, among many other accomplishments. Uplifting and inspirational, William Luers’ Uncommon Company is the true story of a life well lived, celebrating the challenges and triumphs found in the virtues of being a servant leader.