Current scholarship on Latin American historical fiction has failed to adequately take feminism and postcolonialism into account. In this collection of essays, noted scholars use these important contemporary discourses as a starting point for a new definition of the Latin American historical novel that includes four categories: fiction about the search for national identity, magical realism, narrative with historical intertextuality, and symbolic historical fiction. These categories show how the novel evolves through a new emphasis on women and the colonial subject in key texts by Claribel Alegría, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Cristina Peri Rossi, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Ana Teresa Torres, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Ana María Gonçalves, and Mario Vargas Llosa.