Economic Impact

Abstract

This chapter aims to review the impact that economic transformations have on the Latin American narrative, taking into consideration both their local and regional effects and the eventual insertion of Latin American economies into the global order. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the first literary reflections on the financial crises in the region started to appear, to the early twenty-first century, when acute fractures in the notion of work became narrative material, the influence that economic changes have had on literature is manifest. The chapter explores this impact from a double perspective: on the one hand, by examining the specific ways in which literature, such as early twentieth-century realisms or the contemporary documentary narrative, processes economic transformations; on the other, by addressing how those circumstances, such as financial meltdowns, the first worker strikes, and labor crises due to neoliberal policies and New Right movements, also affect fictional or documentary narration. Focusing on the Southern Cone, this chapter emphasizes how an economic perspective can make visible some aspects of literature, cultural relations, thematic repertoires, and interpretative hypotheses that are otherwise blurred or obscured in Latin American narrative.