Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape [Hardcover]

Spanning the whole of Latin America, including Brazil, from its beginnings in 1492 up to the present time, Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg analyze the relationship between literature and the environment in both literary and testimonial texts, asking questions that contribute to the on-going dialogue between the arts and the sciences.To Discover, an Intransitive Verb; Christopher Columbus's First Encounter with the American Landscape Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Water? The Hurricanes that Foundered and the Swamps that Hindered Alvar N?nez Cabeza de Vaca Picaresque Nature: Conquistadors, Parrots, Parasites, Mimics Andr?s Bello's 'Ode to Tropical Agriculture': The Landscape of Independence 'I do not Weep for Camaguey': Gertrudis G?mez de Avellaneda's 19th Century Cuban Landscape Rebellion in the Backlands ( Os Sert?es ): The Darwinian Landscape Yuyos are not Weeds: An Ecocritical Approach to Horacio Quiroga The Landscapes of Venezuela: Do?a B?rbara 'It didn't work, Mother. You should have let me stay here.' Alegr?a's and Flakoll's Ashes of Izalco Pablo Neruda's Latin American Landscape: Nations, Economy, Nature Love in the Time of Somoza: (Gioconda Belli's Ambivalent Ecofeminism) The Landscape of the Consumer Society: Fernando Contreras Castro's Unica mirando al mar

Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg venture beyond the omnipresent critical considerations of place in Latin American writing to mark both the literature s unique valuation of nature and its ever more strident calls for its conservation. They engage texts from across the centuries, mapping the moral questions they raise as well as offering a 21st-century strategy for finding answers in both the artistic and the scientific realms. - Dale Pratt, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University

The landscape offers an opportunity to put the environmental crisis in literary perspective. Rivera-Barnes and Hoeg explore our evolving perceptions and the collection could not be mlc,