Contemporary Latin American narrative: national and transnational origins and destinations

Abstract

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