Description
Book SynopsisThis is the first book in English on Horacio Quiroga (Uruguay 1878-Argentina 1937), a canonical author whose works are read by all advanced students of Spanish in the US and many other countries. The study examines Quiroga’s work through the theoretical lens of the heroic—a lens elaborated in part by means of Quiroga’s own disquisitions on the subject—and the complementary phenomenon of the monstrous. This lens serves to elucidate many evidently obscure and self-contradictory aspects of Quiroga’s work and its relation to the context in which he lived. That context included the neo-colonial social and economic milieu of Argentina’s fast-changing, immigrant-charged, increasingly materialistic society; the growing influence of foreign cultural discourses, particularly Hollywood film; the conflict between the genders in a society that embraced modernity but resisted changes in gender roles; the weight of new scientific discourses, especially Darwinian evolution, in social and political thought; and the impact on pedagogical theory and practice of these multiple changing discourses. This study discloses the extraordinary range of Quiroga’s work, which includes erotic romance, science fiction and fantasy, psychological occult, social satire, a great variety of juvenile literature, outdoor adventure and—most familiar to readers in the United States—gothic and naturalist horror. The book concludes that Quiroga’s consistent imperative of the heroic is essential to reconciling these various, evidently incompatible aspects of Quiroga’s poetics, revealing its theoretical and ethical coherence.
Trade ReviewA wonderful achievement, and a very welcome addition to the body of scholarship on the life and work of Horacio Quiroga, a writer of great relevance in our time of ecological crisis. Todd Garth tackles some of the most puzzling questions for readers of Quiroga—his ambivalent relationship to science and technology, the tension between his fascination with the menacing aspects of tropical nature and his commitment to what is today known as environmental sustainability, and, especially, his apparent misogyny. Garth reads the canonical stories in tandem with Quiroga's lesser-known fiction, his letters, film criticism, and copious writings for children so as to skillfully and convincingly unpack Quiroga's radical critique of the social and sexual mores of the urban bourgeoisie. -- Jennifer L. French, Williams College
Master of a long tradition of the short story in Latin America, Quiroga’s life, works and influence are widely known in the Spanish-speaking world. Violence, tragedy and testing nature’s limits are central to Quiroga’s life and fiction as he moved between the heightened rhythms of urban modernization and immigration, and the untamed, dangerous nature of tropical wilderness. Quiroga asks, “What is a man and what is human?” as he pushes against all limits. Garth seizes on this tension, and confronts the life/fiction dynamic, writing clearly and convincingly about Quiroga’s worlds of society, commerce, nature, and human striving. To write now about Quiroga requires talent and new research. Garth gives us both, with passion. -- Gwen Kirkpatrick, Georgetown University
The work of those writers most difficult to situate in their context can be the most illuminating about competing, unresolved cultural or intellectual forces of their time. Immersing us in the full-bodied paradoxes of an extensive, multifaceted oeuvre, Todd Garth masterfully teases out these revelations in the writing of Horacio Quiroga. Central to Garth’s reading is his analysis of a tense dynamic between the heroic and the monstrous in Quiroga’s conception of the early twentieth-century self of the River Plate region, beset by disorienting modernization, expansive bourgeois culture, immigration, and social change. While emphasizing that Quiroga resisted the explicitly ideological, Garth uses the writer’s conceptual dynamic of the heroic and monstrous to unpack his writing as fertile terrain for critical reflection on shifting social relationships marked by hierarchies of class, cultural origin, or gender and on the impact of modern film, science, technology, and pedagogy on the fraught ethical formation of the modern individual. Essential reading for both specialists and students of Quiroga or his era, Garth’s far-reaching, engaging study offers remarkable critical rigor and documentation; an adroit synthesis of pertinent theoretical sources from Quiroga’s time to the present; and revelatory, context-sensitive readings of both time-honored Quiroga classics and his less-studied work. -- Vicky Unruh, professor emerita, University of Kansas
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: The Heroic Paradigm: Tradition and Innovation of the Pariah-Hero Chapter 2: Strangers on the Land: Immigrants, Neocolonialism and Monstrous Heroism Chapter 3: The Hollywood Invasion: Silent Film as a Portal to the Heroic Living Dead Chapter 4: Men and Women: Bourgeois Convention, the Female Abject and Heroic Gender Conflict Chapter 5: Inventive Nature: Science, Medicine, Technology and the Monstrous Post-Darwin Hero Chapter 6: Concluding with Pedagogy: Father and Teacher as Abject Hero Bibliography Index About the Author
