Imagining the Plains of Latin America: An Ecocritical Study

Description

From the Pampas lowlands of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil to the Altiplano plateau that stretches between Chile and Peru, the plains of Latin America have haunted the literature and culture of the continent. Bringing these landscapes into focus as a major subject of Latin American culture, this book outlines innovative new ecocritcial readings of canonical literary texts from the 19th century to the present. Tracing these natural landscapes across national borders the book develops a new transnational understanding of Hispanic culture in South America and expands the scope of the contemporary environmental humanities. Texts covered include works by: Ciro Alegria, Manoel de Barros, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Romulo Gallegos, Jose Eustasio Rivera, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, and Domingo Sarmiento.

Axel Perez Trujillo Diniz is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, Durham University, UK.

From Sarmiento to Rivera to Gallegos, Axel Perez Trujillo examines Latin America's most renowned writers through an ecocritical lens to trace, with great specificity, the transnational legacy of settler ecologies from the nineteenth century onward. His patient reading of plains imaginaries homes in on specific biomes to shed light on fascinating and understudied categories like continentalism, tropology, and predation. With an eye toward highlighting the urgency of ecocriticism, Perez Trujillo challenges us to rethink representation and reality, space and subject, and hemispheric notions of what constitutes progress and modernity. * Aarti S. Madan, Associate Professor of Spanish and International Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA *