COLONIAL TROPES AND POSTCOLONIAL TRICKS by Lesley Wylie ( 9781846311956 )

Item Details

Title:

COLONIAL TROPES AND POSTCOLONIAL TRICKS
REWRITING THE TROPICS IN THE NOVELA DE LA SELVA

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£109.50
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ISBN 10:

1846311950

ISBN 13:

9781846311956

Publisher:

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Series:

Liverpool Latin American Studies v. 10

Pages:

192

Description:

The vision of the South American rainforest in the Spanish American novela de la selva has often been interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. This book explores how writers throughout post-independence Latin America turned to the jungle as a locus for the contestation of both national and literary identity.

Synopsis:

The vision of the South American rainforest as a wilderness of rank decay, poisonous insects, and bloodthirsty savages in the Spanish American novela de la selva has often been interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. This book offers a new reading of the genre by arguing that, far from being derivative, the novela de la selva re-imagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective, redefining tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perceptions of Amazonia in fictional and factual travel writing. With particular reference to the four emblematic novels of the genre W. H. Hudson's "Green Mansions [1904]", Jose Eustasio Rivera's "La voragine [1924]", Romulo Gallegos' "Canaima [1935]", and Alejo Carpentier's "Los pasos perdidos [1953]", the book explores how writers throughout post-independence Latin America turned to the jungle as a locus for the contestation of both national and literary identity, harnessing the superabundant tropical vegetation and native myths and customs to forge a descriptive vocabulary which emphatically departed from the reductive categories of European travel writing.Despite being one of the most significant examples of postcolonial literature to emerge from Latin America in the twentieth century, the novela de la selva has, to date, received little critical attention: this book returns a seminal genre of Latin American literature to the centre of contemporary debates about postcolonial identity, travel writing, and imperial landscape aesthetics.

Publication:

Imprint:

Liverpool University Press

Returns:

Returnable

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COLOMBIA'S FORGOTTEN FRONTIER

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POETICS OF PLANTS IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE (HB)

POETICS OF PLANTS IN SPANISH AMERICAN LITERATURE