Violations

Stories of Love by Latin American Women

Psiche Hughes

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780803224186
• eBook ISBN: 9780803204737
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Forbidden love was a forbidden topic. Decorum was everything—in society, where Catholicism dictated the terms, and in literature, where a code of decency governed writers and readers alike. To women were left the pale love stories that conducted appropriate partners in proper settings to socially acceptable outcomes. So it was in Latin America well into the twentieth century.

The stories in this volume announce a dramatic change, a transformation of the literature of love in Latin America, and of the role—even the nature—of women in this most "feminine" literary tradition. These stories, by exciting new writers as well as by the renowned, are "violations" of the most exhilarating sort, flouting conventions of language, behavior, subject matter, and style to remake and widen our once-narrow view of the literary landscape of Latin America. Here women writers from Mexico and Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, Cuba, Peru, and Uruguay break social, religious, political, and sexual barriers in fiction that is by turns erotic, satirical, shocking, tragic—and always, in its remapping of literary boundaries, deeply and richly entertaining.

Table of contents

• Introduction: Violation of the Love Story
• To Love or to Ingest
• English Love
• The Fall
• The Sea from the Window
• Young Amatista
• Farewell, My Love
• Immensely Eunice
• Golden Days of a Queen of Diamonds
• In Florence Ten Years Later
• Love Story
• Aunt Mariana
• Procession of Love
• Santa Catalina, Arequipa
• Impossible Story
• Spick and Span
• End of the Millennium
• Source Acknowledgments
• Contributors