The Natural World in Latin American Literatures

From the Popol Vuh to postmodernism, imagery of the natural world has played an important role in Latin American literature. In contrast to the rise of ecocritical scholarship in Anglophone literary studies, Latin American literary ecocriticism has been slower to take root. This volume of eleven essays seeks to advance the ecocritical conversation among Latin Americanists, furthering insight into the relationship between humans and their environments. The essays address regions as diverse as Patagonia and the Chihuahua Desert.

Adrian Taylor Kane is an assistant professor of Spanish at Boise State University, where he teaches courses on Hispanic and Latin American literature. He is currently doing research on the Spanish American environmental novel.

Edited by Adrian Taylor Kane
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 252
Bibliographic Info: 6 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2010
pISBN: 978-0-7864-4287-4
eISBN: 978-0-7864-5760-1
Imprint: McFarland

Preface      1
—ADRIAN TAYLOR KANE

I. NATURE, MODERNITY AND TECHNOLOGY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN FICTION
Ecological Criticism and Spanish American Fiction: An Overview      11
—JONATHAN TITTLER

Nature and the Discourse of Modernity in Spanish American Avant-Garde Fiction      37
—ADRIAN TAYLOR KANE

Nature in the Twentieth-Century Latin American Novel (1900–1967) and in Cien años de soledad of García Márquez      66
—RAYMOND L. WILLIAMS

The Long and Winding Road of Technology from María to Cien años de soledad to Mantra: An Ecocritical Reading      89
—GUSTAVO LLARULL

II. ENVIRONMENTAL UTOPIAS AND DYSTOPIAS

Caribbean Utopias and Dystopias: The Emergence of the Environmental Writer and Artist      113
—LIZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT

Paradise Lost: A Reading of Waslala from the Perspectives of Feminist Utopianism and Ecofeminism      136
—MARISA PEREYRA

Barbarian Civilization: Travel and Landscape in Don Segundo Sombra and the Contemporary Argentinean Novel      154—MARTÍN CAMPS

III. ECOLOGY AND THE SUBALTERN

Dissecting Environmental Racism: Redirecting the “Toxic” in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus      175
—DORA RAMÍREZ-DHOORE

Nature as Articulate and Inspirited in Oficio de tinieblas by Rosario Castellanos      196
—TRACI ROBERTS-CAMPS

National Nature and Ecologies of Abjection in Brazilian Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century      208
—MARK D. ANDERSON

Epilogue: “Beyond the Telluric Novel”      233
—ADRIAN TAYLOR KANE

About the Contributors      237

Index      241

“Recommended”—Choice.