The New Novel in Latin America : Politics and Popular Culture

Exploring such internationally renowned writers as Puig, Vargas Llosa, Cabrera Infante, Fuentes, Donoso, Sainz, Lispector and Isabel Allende, this study examines each writer to discover the nature of and reasons for the major changes in fiction at the time. Swanson challenges many of the new orthodoxies around the so-called Boom in Latin American fiction, and reassesses the whole notion of the new novel seeing a pattern of contradiction rather than consistency. Even at the end of the Boom in the late sixties, the supposed revitalization of the new novel is shown to be fraught with problems and inconsistencies as fiction from Latin America struggles to insert the popular into essentially elitist forms, and to combine nationalist or political statements with a post-modern sense of intertextuality.