South American Literature
South American Literature is a guide covering literature from South America. Please note that this is an ongoing project. As such, we will add new countries to this list throughout the year. Our goal is to have a research guide covering literature from each country.
- Literature Studies Reading ListLiterature Studies is a reading list covering literature from around the world. Please note that this is an ongoing project. As such, we will be adding new countries to this list throughout the year.
Resources
- Latin American Literature: BritannicaLatin American literature, the national literatures of the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere. Historically, it also includes the literary expression of the highly developed American Indian civilizations conquered by the Spaniards.
- The PALABRA Archive: Library of CongressListen to audio recordings of prominent writers from Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, the Caribbean, and other regions with Luso-Hispanic heritage populations reading from their works at the Library of Congress. The PALABRA Archive at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943. Historically known as the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (AHLOT), this collection contains nearly eight-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Spain and Latin America. Recordings include sessions with Nobel Laureates Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and renowned writers, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Amado. To date, thirty-four countries are represented in the collection, and it includes readings in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Mayan, Náhuatl, Zapotec, Aymara, English and Dutch.
Streaming Media
- Biografia: The Lives of Latin American Writers (in Spanish with English subtitles)This five-part series brings to life Latin America’s literary luminaries of the 19th and 20th centuries: Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, Chilean Nobel Laureates Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and Cuban patriot-poet José Martí. Family, friends, and scholars discuss the writers’ lives and works and the events that shaped them, providing detailed portraits of each. Spanish with English subtitles, 5-part series, 28 minutes each.
- Fire & Ink: The Legacy of Latin American LiteratureMyth, magical realism, hard-edged realism, fantasy—the literature of Latin America encompasses all these forms and more. This 13-part series guides viewers chronologically and thematically through the region’s varied genres and narrative styles, linking them to centuries of warfare, colonization, and national struggles for independence and identity. Excerpts from influential works are plentiful, while detailed commentary is provided by an impressive array of scholars—including Eduardo Galeano, celebrated Uruguayan journalist; Sergio Pitol, Mexican writer and Cervantes Prize recipient; Doris Summer, professor of Romance languages andlLiterature at Harvard University; and José Rabasa, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. An FFH&S/Tranquilo Coproduction. 13-part series, 45–54 minutes each.
- The Latin American BoomBy the 1960s, Latin America’s avant-garde movements had matured into a range of literary styles that were firmly entrenched in the cultural landscape. At the same time, there emerged a new and distinctive accent to Latin American literature that was no less authentic than its forebears. This program surveys the artistic phenomenon, manifested most notably in magical realism, that came to be known as the Latin American Boom. Examining the role of journalism and the ways in which various authors stylized their reporting in the service of artistic goals, the program looks at the work of Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Carlos Onetti, José Donoso, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Juan Rulfo. Some language may be offensive. An FFH&S/Tranquilo Coproduction. (50 minutes)
Author's Works & Perspectives
The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry
Here is the first anthology to present a full range of multilingual poetries from Latin America, covering over 500 years of a poetic tradition as varied, robust, and vividly imaginative as any in the world. Editors Cecilia Vicu~na and Ernesto Livon-Grosman present a fresh and expansive selection of Latin American poetry, from the indigenous responses to the European conquest, through early feminist poetry of the 19th century, the early 20th century "Modernismo" and "Vanguardia" movements, laterrevolutionary and liberation poetry of the 1960s, right up to the experimental, visual and oral poetries being written and performed today. Here readers will find several types of poetry typically overlooked in major anthologies, such as works written or chanted in their native languages, thevibrant mestizo (mixed) creations derived from the rich matrix of spoken language in Latin America, and even the mysterious verses written in made-up languages. In addition to the giants of Latin American poetry, such as Cesar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Haroldo and Augustode Campos, and Gabriela Mistral, the editors have included a selection of vital but lesser known poets such as Pablo de Rohka, Blanca Varela, and Cecilia Meireles, as well as previously untranslated works by Simo n Rodriguez, Bartolome Hidalgo, Oliverio Girondo, Rosa Araneda, and many others. Inall, the anthology presents more than 120 poets, many in new translations-by poets such as Jerome Rothengerg, W.S. Merwin, and Forrest Gander-specially commissioned for this anthology, and each accompanied by a biographical note. The book features both English and original language versions of thepoems, a full bibliography, and an introduction by the editors. Sure to stand as the definitive anthology for decades to come, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry remaps the territory, offering new ways of looking at a poetry as diverse and complex as Latin America itself.
Tales from Silver Lands
Atmospheric woodcuts illustrate this Newbery Award-winning collection of 19 South American folktales. Charles J. Finger heard the tales firsthand from native storytellers, whose fables of talking animals, witches, giants, and ordinary people in supernatural settings provide remarkable insights into regional values and culture. The first of the stories, "A Tale of Three Tails," tells of an age when the rat had a tail like a horse, the rabbit had a tail like a cat, and the deer's tail was plumed like the tail of a dog. "The Magic Dog" recounts an act of kindness to a stray animal that helps overcome a witch's curse. In "The Calabash Man," the creatures of the jungle assist a suitor in winning his bride, and in "El Enano," a greedy troll's insatiable appetite leads to his downfall. Packed with adventure and full of surprises, these and other stories emphasize the importance of hard work, courage, and loyalty.
The Alchemist
"My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky." Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams." Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho's charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come. The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, above all, following our dreams.
Latin American Poetry
This study considers the ways Spanish American and Brazilian poets differ from their European counterparts by considering 'Latin American' as more than a perfunctory epithet. It sets the orthodox Latin tradition of the subcontinent against others that have survived or grown up after the conquest then pays attention to those poets who, from Independence, have striven to express a specifically American moral and geographical identity. Dr Brotherson focuses on Modernismo, or the 'coming of age' of poetry in Spanish America and Brazil, and the importance of the movements associated with it. He considers Csar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, probably the greatest of the selection, Octavio Paz, and modern poets who have reacted differently to the idea that Latin America might now be thought to have not just a geographical but a nascent political identity of its own. Poems are liberally quoted, and treated as entities in their own right.