At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a "poetics of madness"--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.

At the turn of the millennium, narrative works by Latin American women writers have represented madness within contexts of sociopolitical strife and gender inequality. This book explores contemporary Latin American realities through madness narratives by prominent women authors, including Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Lya Luft (Brazil), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Laura Restrepo (Colombia) and Irene Vilar (Puerto Rico). Close reading of these works reveals a pattern of literary techniques--a "poetics of madness"--employed by the writers to represent conditions that defy language, make sociopolitical crises tangible and register cultural perceptions of mental illness through literature.

This is the first monograph to consider the significance of madness and irrationality in both Spanish and Spanish American literature. It considers various definitions of ‘madness’ and explores the often contrasting responses, both positive (figural madness as stimulus for literary creativity) and negative (clinical madness representing spiritual confinement and sterility). The concept of national madness is explored with particular reference to Argentina: while, on the one hand, the country’s vast expanses have been seen as conducive to madness, the urban population of Buenos Aires, on the other, appears to be especially dependent on psychoanalytic therapy. The book considers both the work of lesser-known writers such as Nuria Amat, whose personal life is inflected by a form of literary madness, and that of larger literary figures such as José Lezama Lima, whose poetic concepts are suffused with the irrational. The conclusion draws attention to the ‘other side’ of reason as a source of possible originality in a world dominated by the tenets of logic and conventionalised thinking.

The authors of Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism argue that, while the more traditional feminists of the 20th century did not recognize in their theoretical and literary work the diversity of women’s experiences, current Latin American post-feminist and post-modern writers are proposing a transgressive new social order, resulting in a more significant cultural resistance to the society they represent. The authors included in this volume show that the narrative of the writers analyzed here is not limited to recognizing issues focused on gender or even sexuality, but also explores the female aspiration of a dignified life and overcoming the dominant structures in their social, political and cultural dimension. The complex female situation of this millennium has become the primary quandary while searching for new forms to represent women in literature. In Twenty-First Century Latin American Narrative and Postmodern Feminism, the authors confront this dilemma in a sharp, sophisticated and harmonious way, offering a critical text that will be of interest for both specialists and general readers interested in Latin American literature and culture of the recent years.

This book collects essays which discuss women's representation of women and the war story in Latin American literature, looking in particular at their experiences, historical contexts, and their political and creative aims. This collection draws together for the first time a range of narratives of conflict and revolution as represented by Latin American women writers. By embracing a broad definition of conflict and by engaging with a wide range of narratives of conflict, it provides a space for multiple and complex versions of subjectivity, writing and experience-in-conflict to co-exist.

In this innovative new study, Laura Halperin examines literary representations of harm inflicted on Latinas’ minds and bodies, and on the places Latinas inhabit, but she also explores how hope can be found amid so much harm. Analyzing contemporary memoirs and novels by Irene Vilar, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Julia Alvarez, she argues that the individual harm experienced by Latinas needs to be understood in relation to the collective histories of aggression against their communities. Intersections of Harm is more than just a nuanced examination of the intersections among race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. It also explores the intersections of deviance and defiance, individual and collective, and mind, body, and place. Halperin proposes that, ironically, the harmful ascriptions of Latina deviance are tied to the hopeful expressions of Latina defiance. While the Latina protagonists’ defiance feeds into the labels of deviance imposed on them, it also fuels the protagonists’ ability to resist such harmful treatment. In this analysis, Halperin broadens the parameters of literary studies of female madness, as she compels us to shift our understanding of where madness lies. She insists that the madness readily attributed to individual Latinas is entwined with the madness of institutional structures of oppression, and she maintains that psychological harm is bound together with physical and geopolitical harm. In her pan-Latina study, Halperin shows how each writer’s work emerges from a unique set of locales and histories, but she also traces a network of connections among them. Bringing together concepts from feminism, postcolonialism, illness studies, and ecocriticism, Intersections of Harm opens up exciting new avenues for Latina/o studies.