Alternate voices in the contemporary Latin American narrative

Abstract

The chapters in this volume are contributions toward a reassessment of contemporary Latin American writing and are based on the strategy of willfully imposing a perspective at radical variance with the existing bibliography on the subject. By eschewing the approach of a historical overview, by focusing on works that are not predominantly available in English translation, by choosing categories that do not evoke prevailing literary norms, and by concentrating on writings that rashly juxtapose well-known works with relatively unknown ones, the author hopes both to suggest a more comprehensive (although necessarily fragmentary) panorama of Latin American fiction and to suggest a consideration of works on the basis of criter~a other than their "international stature" or the extent to which they represent Spanish-language variations on modalities whose importance has been established by French or American example.