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The Aesthetic Border

Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization

Brantley Nicholson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bucknell University Press,U.S.

Published:22nd May '22

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The Aesthetic Border cover

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel García Márquez to Juan Gabriel Vásquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores García Márquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.

"The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-à-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon."— Camilo Malagón, assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College
"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing—from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vásquez’s fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation’s struggles for artistic expression and literary viability."— Gene Bell-Villada, editor of Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez
“El profesor B. Nicholson, conocedor como pocos de la Colombia profunda y escindida, ha logrado adentrarse en The Aesthetic Border: Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization, con sagacidad investigadora, en los repliegues de la historia reciente que viene desde el asesinato del líder liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (El Bogotazo, 1948) y sus impensables consecuencias políticas partidistas de las que todavía no se ha recuperado el país.”— Hispania

ISBN: 9781684483655

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm

Weight: unknown

162 pages