The regional novel and beyond

Brian Gollnick

doi:10.1017/CCOL0521825334.003

The regional novel from the first decades of the twentieth century marks a turning point in Latin American narrative. In the 1960s, Latin American writers became world leaders in combining technical innovation with commercial success and critical acclaim. However, what came to be known as the Boom novel would not have been possible without advances made in the preceding decades. Beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century, Latin America experienced economic expansion and relative political stability. These changes were accompanied by the consolidation of liberal political institutions that eliminated many vestiges of Colonial society. The regionalist writers of the early twentieth century came to grips with these changes by drawing on international influences and local cultures to generate new narrative forms. The eminent Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama’s outline of this phenomenon remains the most important social periodization of Latin American narrative in the early twentieth century, and his work usefully suggests that the regional novel can be defined in part through its engagement with the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that structure models of citizenship and cultural belonging. The corpus of texts to be addressed under “regionalism” is not obvious. The most apparent inclusion would be the novelas de la tierra, or telluric novels, that describe local realities through nature, rural life, and cultural traits understood as peculiar to Latin America. In the 1930s, Concha Meléndez had already identified this body of works, now established in the literary canon. As Carlos Alonso has argued, even if these novels rely on problematic concepts of representation, they played a crucial role in defining Latin America’s cultural modernity, particularly as a response to US Pan-Americanism and as an expression of revitalization one hundred years after independence.

The regional novel and beyond

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