Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) is one of the notable literary figures in Latin America who in the 1920s contrived both to explore and to define Latin literature within the mainstream of Western history. He managed to be poetic, political and mythological at the same time, and with a degree of synthesis rarely achieved then or since. As is the case with many Latin American writers, his work is inextricably linked with politics, and he lived in exile for many years. He was influenced by Indian mythology, fantasy and Surrealism and was the first Latin American novelist to understand the implications of anthropology and structural linguistics for culture and for fiction. René Prieto examines how Miguel Angel Asturias turns to the cultural traditions of the ancient Maya and combines them with the rhetoric of surrealism in order to produce three highly complex and widely misunderstood masterpieces; the Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), Hombres de maiz (1949) and Mulata de tal (1963). Asturias is the first American author to succeed in portraying an indigenous world vision that is blatantly non-Western.

This study provides a fresh assessment of Spanish Romanticism through a sympathetic appraisal of its literary theory and criticism. It identifies the origins of Spanish Romantic thought in the theories of German Romantic thinkers, in particular Herder's historicism. The range of reference, from the articles of Bohl von Faber to the judgements made by Canete and Valera is counterpointed by the detail of close readings of books and articles published between 1834 and 1844, together with an examination of the ideas which informed the creative work of Fernan Caballero. Derek Flitter's use of the history of ideas offers a corrective to the recent preponderance of political approaches to Spanish Romanticism, countering their stress on its radical and liberal associations with a detailed demonstration that the majority of Spanish Romantic writers derived their inspiration from restorative, traditionalist and Christian elements in their contemporaries' theory and criticism.

In Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative, Anìbal González explores the impact of journalism and journalistic rhetoric on the development of Spanish American narrative, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the testimonial and documentary novels of contemporary authors such as Miguel Barnet and Elena Poniatowska. González examines selected works from the Spanish American narrative tradition that exemplify moments in the history of the relationship between literature and journalism. He argues that Spanish American narrative has sought to work in consonance with journalism's modernizing impulse, making strategic use of journalistic discourse to promote social or political change. In the course of the argument, González offers a broad historical panorama of the journalist/narrative interaction, and at the same time proposes an alternate theory of the development of the Spanish American narrative.

This study of Spanish American autobiography from its beginnings in the post-colonial nineteenth century to the present day concentrates mainly on cultural and historical issues. Spanish American autobiographies are fascinating hybrids, often wielding several discourses at once. They aspire to documentary status while unabashedly exalting the self, and dwell on personal experience while purporting to be exercises in historiography, the founding texts of a national archive. Professor Molloy examines a wide range of texts, from Sarmiento's Recuerdos de provincia to Victoria Ocampo's Autobiografia. She analyses their textual strategies, the generic affiliations they claim, their relationship to the European canon and their dialogue with precursor texts, as well as their problematic use of memory and the ideological implications of their repressive tactics. This method enables her to identify perceptions of self and tensions between self and other, thus shedding light on the fluctuating place of the subject within a community.

This book offers a theory about the origin and evolution of the Latin American narrative, and about the emergence of the modern novel. It argues that the novel developed from the discourse of the law in the Spanish Empire during the sixteenth century, while many of the early historical documents concerning the New World assumed the same forms, furnished by the notarial arts. Thus, both the novel and these first Latin American narratives imitated the language of authority. The book explores how the same process is repeated in two key moments in the history of the Latin American narrative. In the nineteenth century, the model was the discourse of scientific travellers such as von Humboldt and Darwin, while in the twentieth century, the discourse of anthropology - the study of language and myth - has come to shape the narrative. Professor González Echevarría's theoretical approach is drawn from a reading of Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, and the book centres on major figures in the tradition such as Columbus, Garcilaso el Inca, Sarmiento, Gallegos, Borges and Garcia Marquez.

Carlos Alonso's study provides a radical re-examination of the novela de la tierra or regional novel, which plays a central part in the development of Latin American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. He identifies the regional novel as a specific literary manifestation of the persistent meditation on cultural authochthony that has characterized Latin American cultural production from its beginnings, and which in his view springs from Latin America's problematic relationship with Modernity. He proposes a view of the autochthonous as a discourse rather than a referent. Professor Alonso presents his argument through challenging readings of three works that are universally acknowledged as archetypes of the autochthonous modality: Rivera's La voragine, Gallegos's Dona Barbara and Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra.