Latin American Literature at the Millennium

Local Lives, Global Spaces

Cecily Raynor

2021
212 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684482566
Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Luiz Ruffato, Wilson Bueno, Roberto Bolaño, João Gilberto Noll, João Gilberto Noll, and Bernardo Carvalho to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region's transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors' representations of everyday place and modes of belonging. It examines relevant theory on globalization and historical context, including a discussion of the political and economic forces at work when considering Latin America's engagement with global processes. Across its chapters, it traces localizing techniques in canonical works as well as under-studied and peripheral texts, exploring "local" as a plural concept constructed through language, memory, and patterned affective attachments. Students and scholars of Hispanic and Lusophone studies will find it to be a critical text.

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Reviews
"[Latin American Literature at the Millennium] explores aesthetically experimental works that veer from national themes but continue to be political.... Raynor's intervention engages complex geopolitical issues - migration, human trafficking, global trade, and labor - with keen attention to formal experimen­tation." - Luso-Brazilian Review, January 2022

"Latin American Literature at the Millennium emphasizes the economic, social, and political upheavals and changes that characterize the forces of globalization in the region, and examines the transformational responses of literary constructions to an era of intensive global integration affecting the Americas." - Hispania, March 2022

"Uneven experiences of globalization in Spanish America and Brazil - as captured in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century cultural production - are the focus of Latin American Literature at the Millennium. With rich documentation and textured close readings, Raynor breathes new life into discussions on migration, acceleration, spaciality, and the multitude." - Héctor Hoyos, author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

"Raynor's book approaches globalization from an unexpected and little explored angle. Through detailed textual analysis, careful contextualization of literary works, and perspicacious dialogue with critical works, Raynor shows how Latin American literature questions entrenched (though not immutable) dynamics of power and, thereby proposes other ways of understanding not only the region's cultural production, but also how we understand the role that world literature plays in interrogating relations of political and cultural power." - Leila Lehnen, author of Citizenship and Crises in Contemporary Brazilian Literature

"Local Lives, Global Spaces outlines the relationship between globalization and literature in Latin America, offering a key contribution to an exciting, emerging field." - Catalina Quesada-Gómez, co-editor of Cámara de eco. Homenaje a Severo Sarduy

"Latin American Literature at the Millennium is a major contribution to the study of the aesthetics and material practices of literature in Latin America today. Engaging with the Hispanophone and the Lusophone world, Cecily Raynor provides a useful account of questions of space, mobility and globalization." - Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

About the author:

Cecily Raynor is an assistant professor of Hispanic studies and digital humanities at McGill University in Montreal. Her work has been published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Canada and Beyond, Brasil/Brazil: A Journal of Brazilian Literature, and Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150.00, 9781684482573; PDF: $37.95, 9781684482603; EPUB: $37.95, 9781684482580