How did the nationalisms of Latin America's many countries―elaborated in everything from history and fiction to cookery―arise from their common backgrounds in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and their similar populations of mixed European, native, and African origins? Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, discards one answer and provides a rich collection of others.These essays began as a critique of the argument by Benedict Anderson's highly influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson traces Latin American nationalisms to local circulation of colonial newspapers and tours of duty of colonial administrators, but this book shows the limited validity of these arguments.Instead, Beyond Imagined Communities shows how more diverse cultural influences shaped Latin American nationalisms. Four historians examine social situations: François-Xavier Guerra studies various forms of political communication; Tulio Halperín Donghi, political parties; Sarah C. Chambers, the feminine world of salons; and Andrew Kirkendall, the institutions of higher education that trained the new administrators. Next, four critics examine production of cultural objects: Fernando Unzueta investigates novels; Sara Castro-Klarén, archeology and folklore; Gustavo Verdesio, suppression of unwanted archeological evidence; and Beatriz González Stephan, national literary histories and international expositions.

Product Description: This volume deals with the works of major women writers in Spanish America and analyzes the novel, the short story, and testimonio writing of the second half of the twentieth century. It places their work in context by highlighting the importance of women's voices from the colonial period to the twenty-first century, including the most recent poetics of zafarrancho and guerrilla narratives...read more

Product Description: Mario Vargas Llosa is considered one of the great Latin American writers of our time. This book probes and analyzes in a scholarly way the entire work to date of this celebrated author of "The War of the End of the World". Sections include the helix narrative, conversation as a vehicle of narrative, stories within stories, double and multiple time and space, cinema and narrative technique, fragmentation and coherence, fiction and history, the hero and society, the failed hero and the writing of fiction, autobiography and fiction, and the writer as hero...read more

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