Charting the twentieth-century course of the literature of the Americas

The second volume of Earl E. Fitz’s magisterial survey of the field, The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil: The Twentieth Century, analyzes Spanish- and Portuguese-language writing throughout South and Central America as well as in the United States and Canada, where it expanded and flourished over the course of the century. Fitz argues that Spanish American and Brazilian literatures should be treated as two sides of the same coin, together forging a hemispheric identity as new literary aesthetics and political crises swept through the Americas. Fitz takes readers on a comparative journey, analyzing writers such as Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo from Mexico, Julia de Burgos and Luis Palés Matos from Puerto Rico, Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo from Argentina, and Mário de Andrade and Patrícia Galvão from Brazil, among many others, to inspire a more thoroughly integrated understanding of the literature of the Americas.