Latin American Fiction

Abstract

No cultural phenomenon of the 1960s did more than the apparent explosion of creativity in the Spanish American novel to bring Latin America to international attention. It is no exaggeration to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971. At a moment when such creativity was in short supply internationally, when the French nouveau roman was antagonizing ordinary readers and academics everywhere and critics repeatedly asked themselves whether the novel, in the age of the mass media, was now moribund, a succession of Latin American writers — above all, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and García Márquez — rose to international prominence, others from an earlier generation, like Borges and Carpentier, consolidated their status, and Asturias became the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize, in 1967.