Introduction - Unpacking the Canon

Summary

This book is designed for the moderately specialised reader of Spanish and Portuguese who wants an introduction to the main works of the Latin American literary canon. It takes its point of departure from an historical coincidence, namely that the discovery and colonisation of the area of the earth now called Latin America largely coincided with the birth of a new technology for the transmission of knowledge, namely, printing. The world has never been quite the same since Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg printed his forty-two-line Bible in Mainz, Germany, in 1452–56 (Steinberg 21). Gutenberg's discovery of movable type spread like wildfire in the Europe of his day; as Steinberg suggests, ‘[w]ithin fifteen years after Gutenberg's death in 1468 printing presses had been set up in every country of western Christendom from Sweden to Sicily and from Spain to Poland and Hungary’ (Steinberg 27). Twenty-five years after Gutenberg's death, the American continent was discovered and it is no exaggeration to state that the discovery, conquest and colonisation of that land took on a unique quality in the imagination of the West precisely because of the recent discovery of print. The newly-created presses of Europe printed copies of Christopher Columbus's letters to the Catholic Monarchs, they circulated printed versions of Hernán Cortés's letters, as well as Theodor de Bry's images of Brazilian cannibals, which were eagerly bought by the new mercantile classes then emerging in Europe. An earlier age had to be content with the Bayeux Tapestry. As this work hopes to show, the printed word was a crucial component in the cultural configuration that Latin America would gradually create over the next five centuries.

The present study is different from previous studies in three main ways. The typical survey of Latin American literature published in the last twenty-five years fails to address two issues which recent research in adjacent disciplines has discovered to be central to the notion of canon formation that underpins, consciously or not, any literary survey. The first issue concerns the treatment given to pre-1900 literature and, in particular, the indigenous cultural tradition in a study of the Latin American literary canon.