A Tale of Two Souths

Abstract

Deborah N. Cohn's study, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, is a valuable contribution to a relatively new search for literary confluence in the Americas. She pairs three texts written by U.S. southerners with three written by Spanish American writers in an effort to trace the impact of the modernist and early postmodernist literature of the U.S. South upon the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, and Juan Rulfo. Her approach is "appositional" in the sense of its decentering of the troublesome notion of "influence" in favor of a redirection of interest toward "convergences, similar features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous sociopolitical and historical circumstances."