This collection considers the definitions and boundaries of the ‘Latin American’, exploring the
political and aesthetic possibilities of narrating Latin American reality from within and outside
the continent, for multiple readerships, in both Spanish and English. In New Approaches to
Latin American Studies (2017), the editor Juan ...
This collection considers the definitions and boundaries of the ‘Latin American’, exploring the
political and aesthetic possibilities of narrating Latin American reality from within and outside
the continent, for multiple readerships, in both Spanish and English. In New Approaches to
Latin American Studies (2017), the editor Juan Poblete outlines some of the principal directions
the field has taken since the 1980s and thinks about these radical transformations in terms of
‘turns’ in disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces. This special edition brings together recent
research on Latin American literature that responds to the tremendous changes Poblete
describes in relation to the scales, scope and assumptions of the field. The interest in studying
contemporary narrative from the region is strong. In the last decade, specialised volumes on
contemporary Latin American narrative have attempted to describe the broad cultural and
historical processes that have shaped the writing we call ‘Latin American’ or ‘Spanish
American’ post-1980s. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National
Literatures and the Canon (Robbins and González 2014) is a synthetic account that identifies
key aspects of contemporary life in Latin America that shape the way cultural producers relate
to their social formation and their national spaces. The Contemporary Spanish-American
Novel: Bolaño and After (Corral, De Castro and Birns 2013) is a more encyclopaedic
endeavour, offering introductions to sixty contemporary authors from all regions of the
Spanish-speaking Americas but also delineating ‘trends’, from McOndo to Mexican “crack”
and from metafiction to dirty realism. Cecily Raynor’s recent monograph. Latin American
Literature at the Millennium (2021), like this special issue, explores a selection of
contemporary novels with a focus on the mediation between the local and the global. This