Cult of Defeat in Mexico's Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss examines recent Mexican historical novels that highlight the mistakes of the nineteenth century for the purpose of responding to present crises.

Cult of Defeat in Mexico's Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss examines recent Mexican historical novels that highlight the mistakes of the nineteenth century for the purpose of responding to present crises.

The rewritings of the Mexican colonia discussed in this book question a present reality of marginalities and inequality, of imposed political domination, and of hybrid subjectivities. In their examination of the novels, films, poetry, and chronicles produced in and outside of Mexico since 2000, the critics included in Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico produce new interpretations, alternative readings, and different angles of analysis that extend far beyond the theories of the new historical novel of the eighties and nineties, and well beyond the limits of the novel as re-creative genre. Through a transformative interdisciplinary lens, this book studies the ultra-contemporary chronicles of Carlos Monsiváis, the poetry of Carmen Boullosa and Luis Felipe Fabre, and the novels of Enrique Serna, Héctor de Mauleón, Mónica Lavín, and Pablo Soler Frost, among others. The book also pays close attention to a good sample of recent children’s literature that revisit Mexico’s colonia. It includes the transatlantic perspective of Spanish novelist Inma Chacón, and a detailed analysis of the strategies employed by Laura Esquivel in the creation of a best seller. Other chapters are devoted to the study of transnational film productions, a play by Flavio González Mello, and a set of novels set in the nineteenth-century colonia that problematize static notions of both personal and national identity within specific cultural palimpsests. Taken together, these incisive readings open broader conversations about Mexican coloniality as it continues well into the twenty-first century.

The National Body in Mexican Literature presents a revisionist reading of the Mexican canon that challenges assumptions of State hegemony and national identity. It analyzes the representation of sick, disabled, and miraculously healed bodies in Mexican literature from 1940 to 1980 in narrative fiction by Vicente Leñero, Juan Rulfo, among others.

Contemporary Latin American fiction establishes a unique connection between masquerade, frequently motivated by stigma or trauma, and social justice. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between these two themes. Weldt-Basson examines fourteen novels by twelve different Latin American authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Sergio Galindo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso, Mayra Santos-Febres, Isabel Allende, Carmen Boullosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Marcela Serrano, Sara Sefchovich, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ariel Dorfman. She elucidates the varieties of social justice operating in the plots of contemporary Latin American novels: distributive, postmodern/feminist, postcolonial, transitional, and historical justices. The author further examines how masquerade and disguise aid in articulating the theme of social justice, why this is important, and how it relates to Latin American history and the historical novel.

One of the greatest untold stories about the globalization of the Western is the key role of comics. Few American cultural exports have been as successful globally as the Western, a phenomenon commonly attributed to the widespread circulation of fiction, film, and television. The Comic Book Western centers comics in the Western’s international success. Even as readers consumed translations of American comic book Westerns, they fell in love with local ones that became national or international sensations. These essays reveal the unexpected cross-pollinations that allowed the Western to emerge from and speak to a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, including Spanish and Italian fascism, Polish historical memory, the ideology of shōjo manga from Japan, British post-apocalypticism and the gothic, race and identity in Canada, Mexican gender politics, French critiques of manifest destiny, and gaucho nationalism in Argentina. The vibrant themes uncovered in The Comic Book Western teach us that international comic book Westerns are not hollow imitations but complex and aesthetically powerful statements about identity, culture, and politics.

"The book explores how border subjects have been created and disputed in cultural narratives of the Texas-Mexico border, comparing and analyzing Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo literary representations of the border"--Provided by publisher.