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Latin American Research Review 39.2 (2004) 155-163



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Before and after the Boom:

Recent Scholarship on Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies

University of San Diego
Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the 1920s. By Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Pp. 130. $22.50 paper.)
Borges and his Fiction: A Guide to his Mind and Art. By Gene H. Bell-Villada. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Pp. 325. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
Discurso E Historia En La Obra Narrativa De Jorge Luis Borges: Examen De Ficciones Y El Aleph. By Nicolás Emilio Álvarez. (Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1999. Pp. 258. $32.00 cloth.)
The Modern Latin-American Novel. By Raymond Leslie Williams. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Pp. 177. $32.00 cloth.)
JosÉ María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies. Edited by Ciro A. Sandoval and Sandra M. Boschetto-Sandoval. (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1998. Pp. 312. $23.00 paper.)
Mutual Impressions: Writers from the Americas Reading One Another. Edited by Ilán Stavans. (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. 326. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.) [End Page 155]
Carlos Monsiváis: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico. By Linda Egan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Pp. 277. $45.00 cloth.)
The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing. By Naomi Lindstrom. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Pp. 187. $25.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.)
The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Studies. By Alberto Moreiras. (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 350. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

For decades the Boom has often been regarded as the starting point of the modern Latin American novel, often ignoring the fact that those innovations that made the texts precisely so unique had their origins in the narratives produced during the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the last few years, several critics have embarked on numerous projects in an attempt to recover the literature produced during that period. The purpose of this essay is to assess a group of recent volumes about Latin American literary and cultural studies that shed new light on the lives and the literary and cultural production of Latin American writers before and after the Boom. The books presently under review demonstrate the broadening scope of critical analyses on Latin American literature and culture.

In Before the Boom: Latin American Revolutionary Novels of the 1920s, Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez proposes a re-evaluation of Latin American fiction from the 1920s with regard to its influence on the evolution of the contemporary novel in Latin America. She argues that recent postmodern literary theory offers a unique way to reconsider narratives produced during the third decade of the twentieth century. Her project is one of recovery as she attempts to legitimize a literary corpus that has been historically left out of the Latin American literary canon. Thus, in her book, the author seeks to demonstrate the vanguardistas break with previous generations and the subsequent creation of an entirely new and original style that clearly influenced all posterior twentieth-century Latin American fiction. Coonrod Martínez focuses on four novels from the 1920s that, although expressly Latin American in nature, possess specific attributes that belong to unambiguous Mexican, Argentinean, Ecuadorean, and Peruvian realities. The novels studied by the author are: Arqueles Vela's El café de nadie (México, 1926); Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos (Argentina, 1929); Pablo Palacio's Débora (Ecuador, 1927) and Martín Adán's La casa de cartón (Perú, 1928).

These four revolutionary novels have been identified by the author as true creators of the vanguardia and true precursors of the Boom. Coonrod Martínez's thorough analysis of each of these texts within the contexts in which they appeared helps clarify complex and at times obscure issues [End Page 156] that have often been misunderstood by critics and non...

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