The New Novel in Latin America (1920–1950)

Abstract

Abstract Playing the dating game with the Latin American new novel is not a straightforward undertaking. Arguably, the new novel does not emerge as a fully fledged phenomenon until the late 1940s, and peaks during the so-called Boom of the 1960s. However, it continues well beyond the 1960s, and its origins can be traced back to the early twentieth century (or even earlier). The most influential figure in its evolution was a short-story writer who never published a novel, Jorge Luis Borges. His home city, Buenos Aires, was also at the heart of its development, especially with the emergence of an avant-garde or vanguardia from the 1920s, often associated with the Florida and Boedo groups. Other cities, such as São Paulo, and a number of other national cultural scenes also played key roles in the rolling out of a new kind of modern fiction. Moreover, the new novel can also be seen as rooted in the very traditional realist forms, such as the novel of the land, against which it is often seen as reacting. Paris and its surrealist movement were also instrumental, particularly in motivating notions such as the “marvelous real” or magical realism. The embryonic new narrative, as it grows between 1920 and 1950, is a complex, even contradictory, case, straddling the aesthetics of modernism and a quest for Latin American identity, and rupturing literature’s link to reality while still seeking to comment on that reality. In the end, the cult of the “new” is seen as transcending limitations while simultaneously being inevitably contained by them.