Description
Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.
Trade Review"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability." -- Gene Bell-Villada * editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez *
"
The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon." -- Camilo Malagón * assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College *
"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability." -- Gene Bell-Villada * editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez *
"
The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon." -- Camilo Malagón * assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College *
Table of ContentsPreface & Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Gabo Against the World: Gabriel García Márquez and the Poetics of Early Globalization
2. Literary Shipwrecks: Colombian Aesthetic Citizenship after García Márquez
3. Narrating Disruption: From the Novela de la Violencia to the Narco-novela
4. Recasting the Colombian National Story after the Inrush of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
