Companion to modern Spanish American fiction - Donald Leslie Shaw

With such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel ngel Asturias and Gabriel Garca Mrquez (both the latter Nobel Prizewinners) Spanish American fiction is now unquestionably an integral part of the mainstream of Western literature.This book draws on the most recent research in describing the origins and development of narrative in Spanish America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the pattern from Romanticism and Realism, through Modernismo, Naturalism and Regionalism to the Boom and beyond. It shows how, while seldom moving completely away from satire, social criticism and protest, Spanish American fiction has evolved through successive phases in which both the conceptions of the writer's task and presumptions about narrative and reality have undergone radical alterations.
DONALD SHAW holds the Brown Forman Chair of Spanish American literature in the University of Virginia.

A comprehensive and erudite survey of the field... In the two chapters devoted to [the Boom] we are treated to excellent, insightful readings... A valuable work of reference. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT [Anne McLean] An ambitious book of exceptional significance.... Delivers more than its title may promise. On the one hand, true to its encyclopaedic form, the Companion meets the challenge of painting a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Spanish American narrative... On the other hand, Shaw's opus succeeds, almost miraculously, in transcending its monumental format by avoiding over-generalisation... Shaw never fails to provide his readers with a map and compass as he guides them through the forking paths of contemporary Spanish American narrative.
MLR