The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel provides an accessible introduction to an important World literature. While many of the authors covered-Aira, Bolaño, Castellanos Moya, Vásquez-are gaining an increasing readership in English and are frequently taught, there is sparse criticism in English beyond book reviews. This book provides the guidance necessary for a more sophisticated and contextualized understanding of these authors and their works. Underestimated or unfamiliar Spanish American novels and novelists are introduced through conceptually rigorous essays. Sections on each writer include: *the author's reception in their native country, Spanish America, and Spain *biographical history *a critical examination of their work, including key themes and conceptual concerns *translation history *scholarly reception The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel offers an authoritative guide to a rich and varied novelistic tradition. It covers all demographic areas, including United States Latino authors, in exploring the diversity of this literature and its major themes, such as exile, migration, and gender representation.

With such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel ngel Asturias and Gabriel Garc a M rquez (both the latter Nobel Prizewinners) Spanish American fiction is now unquestionably an integral part of the mainstream of Western literature. This book draws on the most recent research in describing the origins and development of narrative in Spanish America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the pattern from Romanticism and Realism, through Modernismo, Naturalism and Regionalism to the Boom and beyond. It shows how, while seldom moving completely away from satire, social criticism and protest, Spanish American fiction has evolved through successive phases in which both the conceptions of the writer's task and presumptions about narrative and reality have undergone radical alterations. DONALD SHAW holds the Brown Forman Chair of Spanish American literature in the University of Virginia.

In the 1960s, there occurred amongst Latin American writers a sudden explosion of literary activity known as the ‘Boom’. It marked an increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels. But the ‘Boom’ of the 1960s should not be taken as the only flowering of Latin American fiction, for such novels dubbed ‘new novels’ were being written in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as in the 1970s and 1980s. In this edited collection, first published in 1990, Philip Swanson charts the development of Latin American fiction throughout the twentieth century. He assesses the impact of the ‘new novel’ on Latin American literature, and follows its growth. Nine key texts are analysed by contributors, including works by the ‘big four’ of the ‘Boom’ – Fuentes, Cortázar, Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa. This book will be of interest to critics and teachers of Latin American literature, and will be useful too as supplementary reading for students of Spanish and Hispanic Studies. It will also serve as a helpful introduction to those new to Latin American fiction.

A reading of contemporary women's fiction in Spanish America in which space, rather than time, is seen as the driver of the narrative. Space is critical to imaginative writing. As English novelist Elizabeth Bowen has observed: 'nothing can happen nowhere'. This book offers an interdisciplinary framework for reading novels, and in particular women's fiction in Spanish America, with a focus on geoplot, on space rather than time as the narrative engine. Following the work of Lefebvre and Friedman, the author examines recent works by Spanish America's most visible women novelists - Angeles Mastretta [Mexico], Isabel Allende [Chile], Rosario Ferré [Puerto Rico], Sara Sefchovich [Mexico] and Laura Restrepo [Colombia] -and the ways in which their female protagonists challenge the spatial barriers erected by capitalist hegemony. Margins, borders, liminal spaces, the chora-space, and the body are emphasized as potential sites of transgression. The analysis identifies spatial negotiation as a mechanism both for cementing and for undermining authority, thus exposing the strategies through which literature constructs and represents power. SUSAN CARVALHO is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, and Director of the Middlebury College Spanish School.

This work deals with selected Latin-American writers of short stories and, in the case of each author, with only one or a limited number of texts. No attempt has been made to write a history of the contemporary short story in Latin America or even to deal with a canon of representative authors. Each of the texts studied has been chosen because it is indicative of a facet of the short story that parallels the so-called Latin American new novel.