Women in Contemporary Latin American Novels

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

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2. Introduction: Liminal Females in Contemporary Latin-American Novels

   • Beatriz L. Botero

   Pages 1-17

3. Literature as Ghost Whisperer in 2666: Narrating the Impossible

   • Chris T. Schulenburg

   Pages 19-42

4. Retelling La charca: Osario de Vivos, Women, and Con/Textual Aggressions in Puerto Rican Literature

   • Nancy Bird-Soto

   Pages 43-60

5. Gender, Space, and the Violence of the Everyday in Parque Industrial

   • Melissa Eden Gormley

   Pages 61-77

6. Mother, Nation, and Self: Poetics of Death and Subjectivity in Julián Herbert’s Canción de Tumba

   • Raúl C. Verduzco

   Pages 79-109

7. The Body in Rosario Tijeras: Between the Life and Death Drives (Eros and Thanatos)

   • Beatriz L. Botero

   Pages 111-134

8. Back Matter

   Pages 135-148

   PDF

This book explores the relationship between psychoanalysis, literary criticism and contemporary literature. Focusing on Latin America, and using examples from Brazilian, Colombian, Chilean, Puerto Rican, and Mexican literature, it provides an important account of why gendered violence occurs and how it is portrayed. In the novels discussed, the protagonists express similar fears, passions and illnesses that are present in contemporary Latin America. Psychoanalysis and literary criticism offer us an interpretative framework to understand these voices, especially those that are in the margin. Women, particularly, as part of a globalized labor force, express through their bodies social problems that range from the erotic use of the body in a hypersexualized world, to the body as a receptacle of violence that expresses the death drive. This book is a fascinating contribution to literary, gender, and cultural studies.

• Psychoanalysis
• Gender
• Identity
• Narrative
• Body
• Roberto Bolano

• Faculty Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

  Beatriz L. Botero

Beatriz L. Botero is part of the Faculty of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. She has a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Literature from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a PhD in Psychoanalysis from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

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