Philip Swanson

Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction

This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of twentieth century Latin American fiction.

The Cambridge companion to Gabriel García Márquez

Chronology Introduction Philip Swanson 1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: life and times Gene H. Bell-Villada 2. The critical reception of Garcia Marquez Donald Shaw 3. Before One Hundred Years of Solitude: the early novels Robin Fiddian 4. One Hundred Years of Solitude Philip Swanson 5. An eco-critical reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude Raymond L. Williams 6. The Autumn of the Patriarch Steven Boldy 7. The General in His Labyrinth Gerald Martin 8. Garcia Marquezs novels of love Mark I. Millington 9. Garcia Marquezs short fiction Stephen Hart 10. Garcia Marquezs non-fiction writings Robert L. Sims 11. Garcia Marquez in film and other media Claire Taylor 12. Garcia Marquez and world fiction Michael Bell Further reading Pascale Baker Index.

The General in His Labyrinth

Two central ideas guide this essay. Firstly, The General in His Labyrinth ( El general en su laberinto [1989]), while not perhaps the most important of Gabriel Garcia Marquezs novels, is nevertheless a culmination of his career as a writer, a kind of compact summa: not only because it is a literary biography of Latin Americas greatest historical icon by a man himself unusually famous and always intrigued by failed heroes, but also because, typologically, it is the book which contains the largest number of different themes and trademark elements which may be identified, in variable degrees, in those other works by Garcia Marquez that preceded and succeeded it. Second, death and burial are perhaps the most compelling and enduring of these central themes that shape Garcia Marquezs writing, just as they shape life itself, and therefore it was particularly appropriate that the Colombian novelist should concentrate on the events leading up to the death of the Great Liberator after so successfully bringing him to life.

Novel theatre: Egon Wolff's Los invasores and the idea of the new in Latin-American drama

It is still something of a commonplace in Hispanic literary criticism to regard drama as the Cinderella of the arts in Latin America, often being looked down upon as a poor relation of the subcontinent’s highly acclaimed novel and poetry. As late as 1991, Diana Taylor’s study began with the comment, ‘Latin American theatre is a relatively unknown field’, and went on to assert that ‘Latin American theatre remains a relatively marginal activity, notwithstanding the dramatic rise in the quantity and quality of the plays produced since the late 1950s’.1 So, although there was some perceived activity that implied a temporal correspondence with the socalled Boom in fiction, there was a distinct sense that the drama produced at this time was inferior. This comes out strongly in the work of critics assessing Latin-American literature just after the height of the Boom and in a period of consolidation of the place of Latin-American literary studies within the North American and European academy in the early 1970s. Jean Franco’s seminal survey makes the point in this way: