The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture After the Boom

by Philip Swanson

This book offers an important, critical insight into the role of politics and popular culture in the works of internationally renowned writers such as Puig, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Fuentes, Donoso, Sainz, Lispector and Isabel Allende. Philip Swanson examines key texts from the late sixties onward, exploring the nature of and reasons for the major changes in fiction at the time. He challenges many of the traditional and new orthodoxies around the so-called "Boom" in Latin American fiction and reassesses the whole notion of the "new novel", seeking a pattern of contradiction rather than consistency. Even after the late sixties, the supposed revitalization of the new novel associated with the so-called "Post-Boom" is shown to be filled with problems and inconsistencies as fiction struggled to insert the "popular" into essentially elitist forms, and to combine nationalist or political statements with a postmodern sense of intertextuality.

186 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1995