Raymond Leslie Williams, The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2003, xi +266 pp.

Abstract

In his preface to The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel, Williams notes ‘This book is a study of the twentieth-century Spanish American novel; I offer brief analyses of specific novels and a critical overview of the Spanish American novel published from 1900–1999’ (ix). In this endeavour, and unlike many of the studies of this genre, Williams also promises to provide: ‘references to the Brazilian, Caribbean, and U.S. Chicano novel’ (ix) as a way of providing a generously broad image of the Latin American novel which developed throughout the twentieth-century. The succeeding chapters are then ingeniously connected by the tread of modernity (ranging from ‘pre’ to ‘post-post’ in its scope) in order to produce the final product.