Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

Southern Cone narratives have captured the attention of readers around the world partly because of supremely talented writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Carlos Onetti, and, more recently, Manuel Puig, Diamela Eltit, Luisa Valenzuela, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Roberto Bolaño. Then there is the unique notoriety of the region that inspires musicals, movies, documentaries, and histories about political upheaval. Critics, too, have accorded the Southern Cone novel greater attention than other novels in Latin America, with the exception of the Mexican novel. Popularity has shaped the region's narrative production, and critics have seen to it that these narratives receive special care and scrutiny. Academic critics often stress the vicissitudes of the Southern Cone's novelistic production in terms of national and regional histories, especially political histories: for example, the nineteenth-century revolutionary struggles, the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, his enforcement of the official use of Guaraní in Paraguay, Perón's populism in Argentina, the struggle of the “common man,” the rise of the Left, the Pinochet and Perón dictatorships, the disappearance of tens of thousands of people, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, as well as the trials and triumphs of redemocratization. Academics write ... log in or subscribe to read full text