Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America

by Edited by Bell Gale Chevigny , Gari Laguardia

• ISBN13: 9780521112567
• ISBN10: 0521112567
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-06-04
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This volume provides a basis for the comparative study of literature of the United States and Spanish America. Previous studies in comparative literature have stressed the influence of Europe on the United States or on Latin America as the creator of the 'New World'. In this book, the editors argue the necessity of a comparative study of the relation between literatures of North, Central, and South America. The first part looks at literature and the historical imagination; the second section focuses on the voice and vision of women; and the final essays are devoted to perspectives on literary criticism. Together the essays discuss the work of prominent Spanish American novelists such as Pablo Armando Fernandez, Luisa Valensuela, Edmundo Desnoes, Neruda, Paz and Borges as well as writers from the United States including Melville, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.

Table of Contents

Preface

History and the Literary Imagination

Introduction Gari Laguardia and Bell

'Insatiable Unease': Melville and Carpentier and the search for an American hermeneutic Bell

The fiction of national formation: The Indigenista novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Rosario Castellanos

Supplying demand: Walt Whitman as the liberal self

Caliban as poet: Reversing the maps of domination

Mrs Williams's William Carlos

Dreams of Two Americas Pablo

The Lives and Fictions of American Women

Introduction Bell

This life within me won't keep still

Interview with Margaret Randall Bell

An invitation to understanding among poor women of the Americas: The Color Purple and Hasta No verte

The other face of the phallus

Plotting women: Popular narratives for women in the United States and in Latin America

Perspectives on Literary Criticism

Introduction

Northrop Frye, modern fantasy, centrist liberalism, antimarxism, passing time and other limits of American academic criticism

Marvelous relaism/marvelous criticsm

Bridge over troubled waters

The poet as critics

Index

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