Introduction

Juan E. De Castro

Nicholas Birns

pp. 1-18

in: Juan E. De Castro, Nicholas Birns (eds), Vargas Llosa and Latin American politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Among the many revolutions of the 1960s, one must count the surprising irruption of the Latin American novel into Western literary consciousness. Until then Latin America had been seen as, at best, a backwater at the margins of the turbulent currents that flowed throughout literature, at worst, merely as a source for topics and settings mined by European and U.S. writers such as Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder. While this view from the cultural center was myopic, to say the least, the fact is that, for instance, a critic of the importance of Edmund Wilson could boast about never having been interested in a Latin American novel.¹

Cited authors

Greene Graham