dc.description.abstract | The aim of this book is to provide a contextual look at the new narrative
in Spanish written in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth
century. Hence its title: “Boom and McOndo. Around the new Hispano-
American narrative”.
The fact that from the 1960s onwards Latin American literature acquired
a new quality is an undeniable fact, and the culmination of these
changes were, in the period from 1967 to 2010, five Nobel prizes awarded
to their writers and poets. However, since the Latin American Boom had
not come out of nowhere, in this book, first, we will approach the literary
process that led Hispanic-American authors to unprecedented success,
which finally assured them a solid position on what we could call the
World Republic of Letters. All of this, in order to be able to see the Boom
phenomenon itself and to trace its different contexts: historical, political
and social, in which it arose, and then it was established until it started to
gradually disappear.
McOndo, whose origins in a certain way derive from the Boom, is
considered as another important pattern in the literary history of the Latin
American subcontinent at the end of the twentieth century, and responds
to the stereotype established as a consequence of the notoriety of some
predominant trends after decades. To see how the young writers revolt,
ideologically and aesthetically, against the labels they consider improper
and even unfair, to approach the two phenomena in the widest possible
way, as well as to look for parallels between the two, is what the pages of
this publication propose.
To organize these reflections it will be used, on the one hand, contemporary
cultural studies that, as a research method, allow us to apply the appropriate
tools for the analysis not only of the text, but also of the context;
on the other hand, due to the comparative nature of the analysis, we will
address the methodology elaborated by the studies referring to the field
of comparative literature. In addition, the focus will be on the modern
mechanisms that affect the flow and promotion of cultural goods, the role
of mediators, both institutional and individual, as well as the formation
of the cultural field and the symbolic management of capital, which form
an inevitable referent within the sociological perspective of literature. To
conclude, we will raise the issue that refers to what is meant by the concept
of literary generation, suitable as a problem to be solved when studying
the work of the writers of the Boom and McOndo. | en |