This book looks to the writings of prolific statesmen like D.F. Sarmiento, Estanislao Zeballos, and Euclides da Cunha to unearth the literary and political roots of the discipline of geography in nineteenth-century Latin America. Tracing the simultaneous rise of text-writing, map-making, and institution-building, it offers new insight into how nations consolidated their territories. Beginning with the titanic figures of Strabo and Humboldt, it rereads foundational works like Facundo and Os sertões as examples of a recognizably geographical discourse. The book digs into lesser-studied bulletins, correspondence, and essays to tell the story of how three statesmen became literary stars while spearheading Latin America’s first geographic institutes, which sought to delineate the newly independent states. Through a fresh pairing of literary analysis and institutional history, it reveals that words and maps—literature and geography—marched in lockstep to shape national territories, identities, and narratives.

"Clear and well documented, this is a very important contribution to the rich, varied work on British imperial activities and to postcolonial studies."--Helen M. Cooper, Stony Brook University Ramirez examines British literary representations of Latin America from the 16th through the 20th centuries, with particular attention to travel writing and fiction published during and after Latin American independence. Locating these representations within the political and economic histories of the countries in which they are set, she places works by Sir Walter Ralegh, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Malcolm Lowry, and Graham Greene within a critical context that can best be called "Americanist" and surveys the prominent themes of these works. She also examines their imperialist impulses and their changing master cultural narratives, from Charles Gould's "idea" of empire and his faith in commercial development for Latin America in Conrad's Nostromo to Lowry's Under the Volcano, a story of a failed and alcoholic English Consul in 1930s Mexico. Americanist literature, as Ramirez sees it, manifests mostly informal aspects of imperialism, reflecting the British desire to invest, develop, map, and catalog in countries as varied as Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Brazil. Ramirez argues that British representations of Latin Americareveal an authorial freedom to advance imperial and commercial projects on one hand, while questioning the English self and sense of strangeness in the New World on the other. Especially in the 19th- and 20-century works under consideration, she reveals an acute sense of vulnerability, as British power worldwide had begun to crumble. Expanding on the critical conversation surrounding "Orientalism" and "New World Studies," Ramirez's examination of informal British imperialism and the struggle of motives represented in each of the selected narratives opens a fascinating new terrain of texts reflecting the historical relationship between Britain and Latin America.

From the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to the Altiplano plateau that stretches between Chile and Peru, the plains of Latin America have haunted the literature and culture of the continent. Bringing these landscapes into focus as a major subject of Latin American culture, this book outlines innovative new ecocritcial readings of canonical literary texts from the 19th century to the present. Tracing these natural landscapes across national borders the book develops a new transnational understanding of Hispanic culture in South America and expands the scope of the contemporary environmental humanities. Texts covered include works by: Ciro Alegría, Manoel de Barros, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Rómulo Gallegos, José Eustasio Rivera, João Guimarães Rosa, and Domingo Sarmiento.

How can Clarice Lispector’s writings help us make sense of the Anthropocene? How does race intersect with the treatment of animals in the works of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis? What can Indigenous philosopher and leader Ailton Krenak teach us about the relationship between environmental degradation and the production of knowledge? Literature Beyond the Human is the first collection of essays in English dedicated to an investigation of Brazilian literature from the viewpoint of the environmental humanities, animal studies, Anthropocene studies, and other critical and theoretical perspectives that question the centrality of the human. This volume includes 15 chapters by leading scholars covering two centuries of Brazilian literary production, from Gonçalves Dias to Astrid Cabral, from Euclides da Cunha to Davi Kopenawa, and others. By underscoring the vast theoretical potential of Brazilian literature and thought, from the influential Modernist thesis of “cultural cannibalism” (antropofagia) to the renewed interest in Amerindian perspectivism in culture. Post-Anthropocentric Brazil shows how the theoretical strength of Brazilian thought can contribute to contemporary debates in the anglophone realm.

Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

Fifty years after the Stockholm Conference first placed the environment on the international development agenda, this Handbook continues the debate. Not only does it discuss the profound environmental and theoretical critique against ‘development’ as modernization and economic growth, but also how perspectives on nature have changed from an infinite resource to a fragile subject.

This book studies how the rhetoric of travel introduces different conceptualizations of space and time in scenarios of war during the last decades of the 19th century, in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. By examining accounts of war and travel in the context of the consolidation of state apparatuses in these countries, Uriarte underlines the essential role that war (in connection to empire and capital) has played in the Latin American process of modernization and state formation. In this book, the analysis of British and Latin American travel narratives proves particularly productive in reading the ways in which national spaces are reconfigured, reimagined, and reappropriated by the state apparatus. War turns out to be a central instrument not just for making possible this logic of appropriation, but also for bringing temporal notions such as modernization and progress to spaces that were described — albeit problematically — as being outside of history. The book argues that wars waged against "deserts" (as Patagonia, the sertão, Paraguay, and the Uruguayan countryside were described and imagined) were in fact means of generating empty spaces, real voids that were the condition for new foundations. The study of travel writing is an essential tool for understanding the transformations of space brought by war, and for analyzing in detail the forms and connotations of movement in connection to violence. Uriarte pays particular attention to the effects that witnessing war had on the traveler’s identity and on the relation that is established with the oikos or point of departure of their own voyage. Written at the intersection of literary analysis, critical geography, political science, and history, this book will be of interest to those studying Latin American literature, Travel Writing, and neocolonialism and Empire writing.