"It examines works by several of Ecuador's most important writers in terms of the interrelations of history and myth, of realism and magic or marvelous realism, and the problems of using orality and dialogism to actively undermine authoritative discourse."--BOOK JACKET.

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

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.

Breaking with linearity – the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world – many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein and Azorín; through its development in the interwar years, by writers such as Raymond Queneau and Vladimir Nabokov; to its full flowering in the work of authors James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, among others; and its later employment by post-war writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino and Maurice Blanchot. Through a series of close readings, the book aims to highlight the various ways in which narrative circularity serves to break with an essentially teleological and theological thinking. Finally, Toribio Vazquez concludes by proposing a new typology of non-linear narratives, which builds on the work of recent narratologists.

In the seventeenth century, local Jesuits and Franciscans imagined Quito as the "new Rome." It was the site of miracles and home of saintly inhabitants, the origin of crusades into the surrounding wilderness, and the purveyor of civilization to the entire region. By the early twentieth century, elites envisioned the city as the heart of a modern, advanced society—poised at the physical and metaphysical centers of the world. In this original cultural history, Ernesto Capello analyzes the formation of memory, myth, and modernity through the eyes of Quito's diverse populations. By employing Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes, Capello views the configuration of time and space in narratives that defined Quito's identity and its place in the world. He explores the proliferation of these imaginings in architecture, museums, monuments, tourism, art, urban planning, literature, religion, indigenous rights, and politics. To Capello, these tropes began to crystallize at the end of the nineteenth century, serving as a tool for distinct groups who laid claim to history for economic or political gain during the upheavals of modernism. As Capello reveals, Quito's society and its stories mutually constituted each other. In the process of both destroying and renewing elements of the past, each chronotope fed and perpetuated itself. Modern Quito thus emerged at the crux of Hispanism and Liberalism, as an independent global society struggling to keep the memory of its colonial and indigenous roots alive.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders. This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eliécer Cárdenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.