Lesley Wylie

This volume offers a new reading of the Spanish-American novela de la selva genre, often interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. Arguing against the commonly held opinion of the genre’s derivative nature, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks examines how novela de la selva fiction reimagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective and redefined tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perspectives. Analyzing four emblematic novels of the genre, this book considers the crucial place of the jungle as a locus for the contestation of national and literary identity by post-independence Latin American writers.

Rewriting the Tropics in the Novela de la Selva

Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks

Peter Hulme

Owen Robinson

Maria Cristina Fumagalli

A collection of essays from distinguished international scholars that explore the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics.

A Literary Geography from New York to Rio

Surveying the American Tropics

Coming to prominence during the rubber fever of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of political turmoil, a place of mass immigration, exile, subjugation, insurgency, and violence, all of which have fostered a long, international literary history. Colombia's Forgotten Frontier maps a literary map of this history for the first time. Lesley Wylie looks at works by writers from Latin America, the United States, and Europe— including works by Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and Williams Burroughs—in order to examine Colombia's literary legacy of marginality and conflict.

A Literary Geography of the Putumayo

Colombia's Forgotten Frontier

Coming to prominence during the tropical booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of mass immigration and exile, of subjugation and insurgency, and of violence. By way of a study of literature of and on the Putumayo by Latin American as well as US and European writers, Colombia's Forgotten Frontier explores the history and enduring significance of this Amazonian border zone, which has been visited both physically and imaginatively by figures such as Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and William Burroughs. Travel writing, testimony, diaries, letters, journalism, oral history, songs, photographs, and 'pulp' fiction are all considered alongside more conventional forms such as the novel. Whilst geographically peripheral, the Putumayo has played a central role in Colombia and beyond, both historically and, crucial to this study, culturally, producing a literature of extreme experience, marginality, and conflict.

The Poetics of Plants in Spanish American Literature examines the defining role of plants in cultural expression across Latin America, particularly in literature. From the colonial georgic to Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, Lesley Wylie’s close study of botanical imagery demonstrates the fundamental role of the natural world and the relationship between people and plants in the region. Plants are also central to literary forms originating in the Americas, such as the New World Baroque, described by Alejo Carpentier as “nacido de árboles.” The book establishes how vegetal imaginaries are key to Spanish American attempts to renovate European forms and traditions as well as to the reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Such a reconfiguration, which persistently draws on indigenous animist ontologies to blur the boundaries between people and plants, anticipates much contemporary ecological thinking about our responsibility towards nonhuman nature and shows how environmental thinking by way of plants has a long history in Latin American literature.

Lesley Wylie

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