LATIN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

the body of writings produced in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere and in Portuguese-speaking Brazil. It also includes the literary expressionthe poetry, theatre, and mythicohistorical writingof the advanced American Indian civilizations encountered by the Spanish conquistadores. Among the earliest works of Latin-American literature are the soldierly reports and historiographical writings of the men who participated in the discovery, conquest, and settlement of the New World. Notable examples of such first-hand accounts include the vividly written dispatches of Hernn Corts and Bernal Daz del Castillo's unpolished yet colourful chronicle of the conquest of Mexico. Reflecting the Renaissance predilection for narrative literature of a heroic mold, many of the later, more cultivated Spanish soldiers of fortune chronicled their adventures and deeds in epic poems. The finest work of this type was Alonso de Ercilla y Ziga's La Araucana (156989; The Araucaniad), a historical poem depicting the struggle between the Spaniards and Araucanian Indians of Chile. The Portuguese colonization of Brazil yielded quite a different kind of literature; much of the writings of the Portuguese explorers and missionaries were devoted to describing and extolling the beauty and virtues of the new land. As Latin-American colonial society stabilized during the 16th and 17th centuries, close ties with the European homeland promoted the development of parallel literary trends. The epic was supplanted by satire and lyric poetry. The latter consisted largely of uninspired imitations of the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Gngora y Argote, but a few works, such as the simple poems of religious and profane love by the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, displayed genuine literary merit. French customs and letters and the ideas of the French Revolution became highly influential in the 1700s. The fervent spirit of the Latin-American revolutionary wars (180824) found expression in patriotic odes and heroic verse, such as those of Jos Joaqun Olmedo and Jos Mari Heredia. By the mid-1800s, the Romantic movement had spread to all the new Latin-American republics. For their subject matter, the Romantics turned to native scenes and local types, as for example the Indian, the gaucho of the Pampas (horseman of the southern plains), and the sertanejo (man of the backlands) of northeastern Brazil. These motifs continued to hold sway in subsequent literature, giving rise to such distinctively Latin-American literary genres as the gaucho literature of the River Plate region and the Indianista novel of Brazil. Another indigenous literary form that developed around midcentury was costumbrismo, poetically realistic sketches of manners and customs depicting varied aspects of contemporary life in provincial regions. Costumbrismo later evolved into the realistic novel of manners, which focused on social problems rather than on the picturesque. In the late 1870s, there emerged throughout much of Latin America a literary movement known as Modernismo, or Modernism. This movement, which reached its apex under the leadership of the Nicaraguan poet Rubn Daro, promoted the doctrine of art for art's sake and embraced as its ideals the beautiful, the exotic, and the refined, amalgamating many diverse trends both native and European (e.g., Symbolism, Parnassianism, and Decadentism). The horrors of the Mexican Revolution (191020) awakened among Latin-American writers an intense social consciousness. Rejecting the modernist literature of artistic escape, they produced prose fiction that focused on the mistreatment and plight of the massesthe Indian, the black man, the mestizo peasant, and the poor city worker. Examples of this form of writing include Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo (1915; The Under Dogs) and Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1934; The Villagers). In poetry Csar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and others created pieces that combined sociopolitical concerns with daring innovations in verse forms and imagery. In drama, significant attempts at experimentation and renovation were undertaken, particularly in Mexico and Brazil, during the late 1920s and '30s under the influence of movements ranging from Expressionism to the Theatre of the Absurd. Latin-American literature in the last half of the 20th century has become more universal in its themes and symbols and has fully entered the mainstream of Western literature. It has exhibited an increased preoccupation with philosophical questioningwith the problem of modern man as the victim of alienating forces, solitude, existential despair, and evil. Also evident is an enduring fascination with psychological analysis and magic realismthe interplay of reality and fantasy or dream. Such are particularly characteristic of the prose fiction of a host of contemporary authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Eduardo Mallea, Julio Cortzar, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Isabel Allende. the national literatures of the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere and of Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Historically, it also includes the literary expression of the highly developed American Indian civilizations conquered by the Spaniards. Over the years, Latin-American literature has developed a rich and complex diversity of themes, forms, creative idioms, and styles. A concise survey of its development is provided here. Additional reading Since the 1960s there has been a remarkable increase in the translation of Latin-American literature, and most of the important writers are easily available in English. Collections have not kept up with individual works, because of the enormous amount of material, and most general anthologies and histories are seriously out-of-date. Nevertheless, there are a number of useful histories, a great majority of which are national in scope, including John S. Brushwood, The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth-Century Survey (1975), and Genteel Barbarism: Experiments in Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American Novels (1981); Margaret Sayers Peden (ed.), The Latin American Short Story: A Critical History (1983); and Octavio Armand (ed.), Toward an Image of Latin American Poetry (1982). The Handbook of Latin American Studies (annual), prepared by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, contains an extensive critical bibliography of literature in the even-numbered volumes.Informative literary histories and critical studies include Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers (1967); Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (1969, reissued 1975), and The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, rev. ed. (1970); John Nist, The Modernist Movement in Brazil: A Literary Study (1967); Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey of Brazilian Writing in the Twentieth Century (1970; originally published in Portuguese, 3rd updated ed., 1969); D.P. Gallagher, Modern Latin American Literature (1973); David William Foster and Virginia Ramos Foster (compilers and eds.), Modern Latin American Literature, 2 vol. (1975), a critical commentary on more than 100 Latin-American writers; Jos Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History (1977; originally published in Spanish, 1972); Rita Guibert, Seven Voices (1973), conversations with Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortzar, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante; Darcy Ribeiro, The Americas and Civilization (1971; originally published in Portuguese, 1970); and Djelal Kadir , Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance (1986).Special topics are treated in Luca Fox-Lockert, Women Novelists in Spain and Spanish America (1979); Doris Meyer and Margarite Fernndez Olmos (eds.), Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America, 2 vol. (1983), with vol. 1 containing critical essays and vol. 2 an anthology; Marvin A. Lewis, Afro-Hispanic Poetry, 19401980: From Slavery to Negritud in South American Verse (1983); Richard L. Jackson, Black Writers in Latin America (1979), and Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America (1988); David T. Haberly, Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature (1983); William Luis (ed.), Voices From Under: Black Narrative in Latin America and the Caribbean (1984); and Braulio Muoz, Sons of the Wind: The Search for Identity in Spanish American Indian Literature (1982). Useful genre anthologies include William I. Oliver (ed. and trans.), Voices of Change in the Spanish American Theater (1971); George Woodyard (ed.), The Modern Stage in Latin America (1971); George Woodyard and Marion Peter Holt (eds.), Latin America: Plays (1986); Nick Caistor (ed.), The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories (1989); Marjorie Agosin (ed.), Landscapes of a New Land: Fiction by Latin American Women (1989); Mary Crow (ed.), Woman Who Has Sprouted Wings: Poems by Contemporary Latin American Women Poets, 2nd ed. (1988); Evelyn Picon Garfield (ed. and trans.), Women's Fiction from Latin America: Selections from Twelve Contemporary Authors (1988); Alberto Manguel (ed.), Other Fires: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1986); Ann Venture Young (ed. and trans.), The Image of Black Women in Twentieth-Century South American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1987); and Robert Kalechofsky and Roberta Kalechofsky (eds.), Echad: An Anthology of Latin American Jewish Writings (1980). John E. Englekirk Frank N. Dauster Literary developments of the 20th century World Wars I and II, the intervening worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, and the Spanish Civil War thrust the nations of Latin America onto the international scene, altering the perspective and general orientation of Latin-American men and women of letters. Regionalistic preoccupations gave way to more universal concerns, a shift that was accompanied not only by new themes but also by new literary modes and stylistic techniques. The works that emerged during the second half of the century demonstrate the full maturing of Latin-American literature and its entry into the mainstream of Western letters. Vanguard literature When the Modernist leaders Daro and Lugones turned to frequent use of more traditional forms and especially to themes dealing with the troubled external world, their followers and many younger poets continued to explore the complex versification and language and new thematic sources with which Modernism had enriched Hispanic poetry. Prominent among them was an extraordinary group of women, some of whom dealt with traditional themes. Love in its various manifestations, maternal longing, and social protest were the subject matter of the Uruguayans Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou and of the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Argentine Alfonsina Storni dealt in an innovative, ironic idiom with personal anguish and the difficulties of being a woman in a stern male world. Springing from various aspects of the Modernist tradition were the allusive, interiorized lyrics of the Peruvian Jos Mara Eguren; the idiosyncratic blend of daring imagery, Baudelairean struggle, and provincial themes of the Mexican Ramn Lpez Velarde; and the brilliant sonnet sequence of the tropical scene in Tierra de promisin (1921; Land of Promise) by the Colombian Jos Eustasio Rivera. Poetry after World War I was extraordinarily rich and complex. Some groups, following the nihilistic waves of post-World War I isms, experimented with free verse, often daring to use obscure imagery that gave a mistaken impression of a coldly intellectual mood. Many of these vanguard experimenters wrote out of a sociopolitical commitment as well. In the experiments of the Puerto Rican Luis Pals Matos, the Cuban Nicols Guilln, and others, the voice and song of the African tradition were carried to a high artistic level. Vicente Huidobro of Chile is important for his insistence on the poet's total creation of an autonomous world, an approach that was extremely influential on younger figures. Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges launched Ultrasmo in Buenos Aires in 1921 but evolved from these avant-garde beginnings to a poetry reflecting love for his city, a familiarity with numerous foreign literatures, and a preoccupation with metaphysical themes. These latter elements are also discernible in Borges' short stories, which brought him international fame and have influenced writers throughout the world. Csar Vallejo of Peru fused social concerns with Surrealism and the heritage of Modernism to create an intensely subjective and often obscure but vital poetry. The Chilean Pablo Neruda, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, also blended Marxism with Surrealism in his earlier work; he attempted a poetic synthesis of the suffering of the Americas in the Canto general (1950; General Song). In his enormous production Neruda made poetry of even the smallest aspects of the world he saw about him. There were numerous other distinguished poets of the Postmodernist period; the years from the beginning of Modernism to the end of Postmodernism rival the Spanish Golden Age of the 16th and 17th centuries in wealth of poetry. The vanguard revolt in Brazil, usually referred to as Modernism (Modernismo; although quite different from Spanish-American Modernism), broke away noisily from academicism and colonial cultural bondage at the noted Modern Art Week program in So Paulo in 1922. The primary aim of the Brazilian Modernists (Modernistas) was to modernize national thought and life, casting aside the persistent vestiges of the 19th century. This high-pitched, often theatrical, self-searching period of aesthetic reevaluation and analysis of the immediate Brazilian present served as a necessary purge and produced such important figures in Brazilian literature as the movement's leader, Mrio de Andrade, a gifted poet and musicologist; his lieutenant, Oswald de Andrade; Ronald de Carvalho, a critic and poet; and Manuel Bandeira, who has been acclaimed the country's greatest modern lyric poet. Preoccupation with social and metaphysical problems and an imperative urge toward untrammeled self-expression characterized the poetry of Modernist contemporaries or followers, such as Jorge de Lima, Ceclia Meireles, and Augusto Federico Schmidt. The 19th century Romanticism Political independence from Spain and Portugal did not bring an end to despotism, anarchy, and repression of the Indian and African populations; economic and political stability for most new nations came late and with difficulty, if at all. In literature, American themes fired the imagination of the liberators, but Neoclassical forms were still dominant. European Romanticism also pointed the way to cultural independence, even though that way lay largely along a route marked out by French, English, and Spanish writers. The controlled form of Neoclassicism yielded to the freedom, individualism, and emotional intensity of Romanticism, and the European cult of the medieval became in many cases a passion for the Indianpresent and past. The most illustrious early Romantics were Argentine political refugees who fled from the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Their leader was Esteban Echeverra, whoafter a stay in France (182630), where Romanticism was at its heightled the movement in La cautiva (1837; The Captive), one of the earliest fusions of native themes and scenes with newer free verse forms. The polemical Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, like so many of Latin America's 19th-century intellectuals a statesman, educator, and writer, provided the first serious study of the pampas, or plains, and of gaucho (cowboy) lore in his Facundo (1845; Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism), a biographical mlange of fiction, sociology, and politics written in passionate denunciation of Rosas. This emphasis on the national scene gave birth to an indigenous literary genre without European prototype, the gaucho literature of Argentina and Uruguay. The gaucho had long been the subject of folk literature and soon figured in cultivated verse, as in Rafael Obligado's poem Santos Vega (1887), on the legendary minstrel, and the humorous Fausto (1866; Faust) by Estanislao del Campo, until finally he received epic treatment in Martn Fierro (187279; The Gaucho Martin Fierro) by Jos Hernndez. This Romantic evocation of national themes and types reached its poetic climax while also pointing the way to the next period in the elegiac Tabar (1886; Tabar: An Indian Legend of Uruguay) by the Uruguayan Juan Zorrilla de San Martn. Zorrilla's epic poem related the fate of the aboriginal Charras, who were vanquished by Spanish invaders. In prose, Juan Len Mera of Ecuador contributed Cumand, o, un drama entre salvages (1871; Cumand, or, A Drama Among Savages), and Manuel de Jess Galvn of the Dominican Republic added Enriquillo: leyenda histrica dominicana (187982; Enriquillo: Dominican Historical Legend; Eng. trans. The Cross and the Sword) to a growing number of fictionalized portrayals of Indian life. The Colombian Jorge Isaacs wrote the popular, lachrymose idyll Mara (1867), and, among the growing number of political novels, Jos Mrmol gave a one-sided view of life in Argentina under the tyranny of Rosas in Amalia (185155). The tradicin, patterned after the historical anecdote, was exploited by the Peruvian Ricardo Palma, whose series called tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian traditions) appeared between 1872 and 1910. The Brazilian Romantics had no similar past to idealize and instead extolled the natural beauties of their homeland and the simple Indian life. Domingo Jos Gonalves de Magalhes, though still eclectic, launched the Romantic movement with Suspiros poticos e saudades (1836; Poetic Sighs and Longings). The best and most representative of Brazil's Romantic poets is Antnio Gonalves Dias, whose best-known poem, Cano do Exlio (1843; Song of Exile), laments his exile from his country and family. Later phases were exemplified in a poetry of doubt and despair by Manuel Antnio Alvares de Azevedo, author of Noite na taverna (1855; Night at the Tavern), and in the sociopolitical verse of Antnio de Castro Alves, author of Os escravos (1876; The Slaves). The theatre was not one of Latin America's strongest genres during the Romantic period, consisting primarily of melodrama, regional comedy, and political pamphleteering. Among the exceptions are the Neoclassical comedies of Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (Mexico), the satires of Manuel Ascensio Segura (Peru), and the dramas Cuba's Gertrudis Gmez de Avellaneda created out of serious psychological analysis and careful dramatic structure. She produced her plays in Spain, however, where she spent most of her life. Realism and naturalism Romantic interest in the picturesque and unusual led writers to discover a regional way of life, and shortly after midcentury the cuadro de costumbres, or sketch of contemporary customs, developed into a realistic novel of manners, often with an urban setting. Many of these novels are the expression of an ideal national history connected to political independence. From that time, the novel assumed a more commanding role in Latin-American letters, but it appeared almost concurrently with the several types representative of successive literary trends in Europe, whose masters provided the molds into which Latin-American themes were poured. Alberto Blest Gana began producing a series of costumbrista novels on Chilean life, of which Martn Rivas (1862) was considered the best. Naturalism in the manner of mile Zola made its appearance with the Argentine Eugenio Cambaceres. After midcentury, several late-Romantic political writers, both Brazilian and Spanish-American, distinguished themselves in essay form. Among them were Juan Montalvo, Eugenio Mara de Hostos, Joaquim Nabuco, and Rui Barbosa. Manuel Gonzlez Prada, an ironic experimental poet and essayist, was the chief figure, and his verse paved the way for the new poetry of a coming generation of rebels. The true novel appeared first in Brazil in 1844 with A moreninha (The Little Brunette) by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo. Still one of the most widely read of his country's novelists, Jos Martiniano de Alencar initiated a vogue of the Brazilian Indianist novel with O Guaran (1857; The Guaran Indian) and Iracema (1865). These romantic tales of love between Indian and white, however, represented only one aspect of Alencar's varied literary activity. He also turned to the life and customs of Brazil's backlands, and O gacho (1870) and O sertanejo (1875; The Man of the Backlands), though still markedly Romantic in spirit, were among the forerunners of a flourishing regional literature. Two other contributors to this transitional genre were Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay, whose Inocncia (1872) became a universal favourite, and Bernardo Guimares, whose abolitionist A escrava Isaura (1875; The Slave Isaura) was a decisive step toward the novel of social protest. True realism, with a definite leaning toward naturalism, began with Memrias de um sargento de milcias (1854; Memories of a Sergeant of the Militias) by Manuel Antnio de Almeida, but it was not until the mid-1870s that the novel began to expose widespread social and psychological maladjustments to a rapidly changing economic scene. Aluzio Azevedo, an early example of social protest in the manner of 20th-century novelists, wrote such favourites as O mulato (1881; The Mulatto) and O cortio (1890; A Brazilian Tenement). Less occupied with external aspects of Brazilian life, Joaquim Maria Machado de Asss pried into the psychological complex of the Brazilian and distinguished himself as his country's most original and gifted writer. His trilogy, Memrias pstumas de brs cubas (1881; Epitaph of a Small Winner), Quincas Borba (1891; Philosopher or Dog?), and Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans. Dom Casmurra), was a landmark in Latin-American letters.