Characters are made, scripted, and invented, but Creators and Created Beings in Twentieth-Century Latin American Fiction explores what occurs when literary creations become creators themselves. Representing Latin American fiction’s increasingly skeptical gaze in the early- to mid- twentieth century, these literary creators breach the metafictional frame in order to problematize themes including life and death, gender and sexuality, and technology. Drawing upon a diverse range of literary works by canonical and non-canonical authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Carlos Onetti, Julio Cortázar, María Luisa Bombal, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Arlt, Juan José Arreola, Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Clemente Palma, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Pedro Angelici, this study excavates critical ontological and epistemological inquiries and delves into questions of identity, power, scientific knowledge, and the transformative nature of fiction.

Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.

Featuring canonical Spanish American and Brazilian texts of the 1920s and 30s, Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature is an innovative analysis of the body as site of inscription for avant-garde objectives such as originality, subjectivity, and subversion.

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 draws together entries on all aspects of literature including authors, critics, major works, magazines, genres, schools and movements in these regions from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. With more than 200 entries written by a team of international contributors, this Encyclopedia successfully covers the popular to the esoteric.The Encyclopedia is an invaluable reference resource for those studying Latin American and/or Caribbean literature as well.

The Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater provides users with an accessible single-volume reference tool covering Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela). Entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, give succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history. The introduction provides a review of Latin American literature and theater as a whole while separate dictionary entries for each country offer insight into the history of national literatures. Entries for literary terms, movements, and genres serve to complement these commentaries, and an extensive bibliography points the way for further reading. The comprehensive view and detailed information obtained from all these elements will make this book of use to the general-interest reader, Latin American studies students, and the academic specialist.

Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in Latin America examines the seminal influence that Latin American writers had on the style, subject matter, and ideology of literature in the Global South from 1900 to the late 1930s. Gorica Majstorovic challenges the historical and racial logic of interwar Latin American literary studies by introducing the solidarity relations between the global decolonial movements and placing anti-imperialism, Blackness, and indigeneity at the center of decolonial analysis. Following Mignolo, de Sousa Santos, and Cheah, the texts under analysis subvert the processes of European colonial worlding and show modernity itself as pluralized. Drawing on these works, Majstorovic bridges the gap between aesthetics and politics while shifting the focus onto the Latin American transnational modernist networks and situating the analysis within the theoretical frameworks of the Global South. While examining the idea of globality through its different conceptualizations (cosmopolitanism, immigration, and travel), Majstorovic analyzes avant-garde magazines of the 1920s, Mexican petrofiction, urban proletarian, and decolonial travel narratives of the 1930s, calling into question modernism’s usual framing as an Anglo-American interwar phenomenon. Majstorovic constructs a new genealogy of Latin American literature by examining the asymmetrical relations within its multiple modernities and offers a new understanding of Latin American interwar literature through the lens of the Global South.

A Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Spanish American novels of the Boom period (1962-1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century's novels. In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the desire to be modern as his organizing principle, he divides the century's novels into five periods and discusses the differing forms that "the modern" took in each era. For each period, Williams begins with a broad overview of many novels, literary contexts, and some cultural debates, followed by new readings of both canonical and significant non-canonical novels. A special feature of this book is its emphasis on women writers and other previously ignored and/or marginalized authors, including experimental and gay writers. Williams also clarifies the legacy of the Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern as he introduces new writers and new novelistic trends of the 1990s.