Victoria Carpenter Book order

This volume presents a number of close readings of Latin American literary and cultural phenomena. The overarching theme of the collection is the revision of the accepted view of Latin American national identities as represented in twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture. The book examines the complexity of national identities forged among political crises, economic upheaval and intercultural influences. The essays included here focus upon internal contradictions of national identity and the factors contributing to this discord. Among these are the nature of the Latin American intellectual, Latin American modernity and exile, and the psychological underpinning of the re-creation of history. Some of the chapters challenge the existing theoretical framework for Latin American literary analysis by employing non-literary theories to analyse hitherto overlooked textual anomalies. The book is a Festschrift for Professor Peter R. Beardsell, reflecting the importance of his contribution to Latin American literary and cultural studies.

This volume addresses the representation of history and collective memory in Latin American literature. The book presents a variety of novel perspectives on the subject, linked by the common themes of the subjectivity of time and history, literature used as a political tool and the representation of marginalized groups.The collection takes an original approach to viewing national histories as represented in literature by adopting a cross-disciplinary position. While there are other publications addressing some of the issues raised in this collection, this book goes beyond literary representations of history. The essays collected here examine technological, political and social developments as a means of creating, re-structuring and (in some cases) potentially destroying nations.

This collection of essays derives from a conference on Violence, Culture and Identity held in St Andrews in June 2003. It is a contribution to the understanding of representations of violence in Latin American narrative. The collected essays are dedicated to the study of the problematic history of violence as a means of ‘civilizing’ the region: violence used by dictatorial regimes to eradicate the collective memory of their actions; violence as a result of the history of marginalizing segments of the population; sexual violence as an attempt at complete control of the victim. The essays establish a clear link between historical, political and literary constructs spanning the past five hundred years of Latin American history. Close readings of political texts, historical documents, prose, poetry and films employ identity theories, postcolonial discourse, and the principles of mimetic and sacrificial violence. The volume adds to the ongoing critical investigation of the relationship between Latin American history and narrative, and to the key role of representations of violence within that narrative tradition.