The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil

The Twentieth Century

Earl E. Fitz

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9780813953311
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Literature

Charting the twentieth-century course of the literature of the Americas

The second volume of Earl E. Fitz’s magisterial survey of the field, The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil: The Twentieth Century analyzes Spanish- and Portuguese-language writing throughout South and Central America as well as in the United States and Canada, where it expanded and flourished over the course of the century. Fitz argues that Spanish American and Brazilian literatures should be treated as two sides of the same coin, together forging a hemispheric identity as new literary aesthetics and political crises swept through the Americas. Fitz takes readers on a comparative journey, analyzing writers such as Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo from Mexico, Julia de Burgos and Luis Palés Matos from Puerto Rico, Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo from Argentina, and Mário de Andrade and Patrícia Galvão from Brazil, among many others, to inspire a more thoroughly integrated understanding of the literature of the Americas.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Value of a Comparative Approach to Modern Latin American Literary Study
• 1. Brazil and Spanish America at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 2. 1900–1916: From the Dawn of the Twentieth Century to the End of World War I
• 3. 1916–1929: From the Armistice to the Economic Crash
• 4. 1929–1945: The Great Depression Years to the End of World War II
• 5. 1945–1960: The Postwar Era and the 1950s
• 6. 1960–1970: The “Boom” Era and New Trends in Hemispheric Influence and Reception
• 7. 1970–1985: The Post-Boom Era and the Postmodern Debate
• 8. 1970s and 1980s: Literature and Politics in the Americas
• 9. 1990–2000: Latin American Writing at the End of the Twentieth Century
• 10. Some Additional Comments
• Conclusion: Latin American Literature and Its Importance to World Literature
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index