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"This book is a series of original, critical meditations on short stories and novels from Central America between 1995 and 2016. During the Cold War, literary art in Central America, as in Latin America in general, was strongly over-determined by the politics of the Cold War, which gave rise to popular struggle and three major armed civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. The period produced intense literary activity with political ideology central, personified by social denunciation in the testimonial novel and revolutionary poetry. Since then, though themes of violence are still at much of its core, Central American fiction has become more complex. We have witnessed a resurgence of literary writing and criticism with a focus squarely on the artistic side of narrative art: writing aware of its own figurative manoeuvres and inventiveness, its philosophical and affective dimensions, and its carefully crafted syntax. This collection of essays by Jeffrey Browitt attempts to trace some of the contours of this new literature and the contemporary subjectivities of its writers through close readings of Guatemala's Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Eduardo Halfon and Denise Phé-Funchal; Nicaragua's Franz Galich and Sergio Ramírez; Belize's David Ruiz Puga; El Salvador's Jacinta Escudos and Claudia Hernández; and Costa Rica's Carlos Cortés. Key themes are gender, subjectivity and affect as these intersect with the deconstruction of the family, hegemonic masculinity, motherhood, revolutionary romanticism, and the relationship of humans with animals" --
Central American fiction --- Families in literature. --- Family in literature --- Central American literature --- History and criticism.
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Cicatrices provides an understanding of the mood in Central American fiction over the last five years. Many recent novels and short stories are aesthetic responses to a difficult social, political and economic landscape dominated by neoliberal adjustment, drug trafficking, corruption and the struggle to establish fully democratic societies. Herein is a mix of male and female authors spread across five Central American countries: Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras. Thematic unity is provided by nomadism, migration and the inability to leave behind a violent past of armed conflict that bleeds into the present-scars that won't heal. An atmosphere of survival, exhaustion, dissipation and decay (in both the physical and moral sense) dominates, but also rays of hope: the writers testify to the triumph of the spirit as much as to its destruction. This vibrant literature speaks of existential crisis in a context of social precarity and lack of opportunity as people dis-embedded by civil war and its aftermath seek release and fulfillment through migration across borders into neighbouring countries or north to the United States or Europe. Whether external or internal, self-imposed or forced, migration brings in train the problem of mal-adaptation to new worlds and struggles with memory - an aesthetics of loss and solitude. Various narrative strategies are adopted to try to account for this contemporary social reality, including crime fiction as critical realism, as well as auto-fiction.
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