First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. The aim of this book is to approach Latino fiction from a wider perspective, and to cross the standard critical boundaries between Latino groups in order to focus upon the literary language of a collection of complicated novels and stories.

In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film, performance art, and multi-media digital texts, among others. The essays provide conceptual vocabularies and tools to help teachers design courses that pay attention to: Issues of form across a range of storytelling media Issues of content such as theme and character Issues of historical periods, linguistic communities, and regions Issues of institutional classroom settings The volume innovatively adds to and complicates the broader humanities curriculum by offering new possibilities for pedagogical practice.

The Routledge Concise History of Latino/a Literature presents the first comprehensive overview of these popular, experimental and diverse literary cultures. Frederick Luis Aldama traces a historical path through Latino/a literature, examining both the historical and political contexts of the works, as well as their authors and the readership. He also provides an enlightening analysis of: the differing sub-groups of Latino/a literature, including Mexican American, Cuban American, Puerto Rican American, Dominican American, and Central and South American émigré authors established and emerging literary trends such as the postmodern, historical, chica-lit storytelling formats and the graphic novel key literary themes, including gender and sexuality, feminist and queer voices, and migration and borderlands. The author’s methodology and interpretation of a wealth of information will put this rich and diverse area of literary culture into a new light for scholars. The book’s student-friendly features such as a glossary, guide to further reading, explanatory text boxes and chapter summaries, make this the ideal text for anyone approaching the area for the first time.

Employing a comparative and cross-ethnic approach, this book provides a sophisticated literary and cultural analysis of texts by Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American women writers. As she engages contemporary feminist, political, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theory, Fatima Mujčinović investigates how selected U.S. Latina narratives have proposed a rethinking of minority subject positioning under the postmodern conditions of cultural hybridization, gender objectification, political oppression, and geographic displacement. In its emphasis on gendered, diasporic, exilic, and geopolitical identities, this book specifically examines works by Ana Castillo, Cristina García, Graciela Limón, Demetria Martínez, Rosario Morales, Aurora Levins Morales, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Helena María Viramontes, and Julia Alvarez.

Presenting an up-to-date critical perspective as well as a cultural, political and historical context, this book is an excellent introduction to Mexican American literature, affording readers the major novels, drama and poetry. This volume presents fresh and original readings of major works, and with its historiographic and cultural analyses, impressively delivers key information to the reader.

Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.