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Book Cover for: Central American Literatures as World Literature, Sophie Esch

Central American Literatures as World Literature

Sophie Esch

Challenging the notion that Central American literature is a marginal space within Latin American literary and world literary production, this collection positions and discusses Central American literature within the recently revived debates on world literature.

This groundbreaking volume draws on new scholarship on global, transnational, postcolonial, translational, and sociological perspectives on the region's literature, expanding and challenging these debates by focusing on the heterogenous literatures of Central America and its diasporas. Contributors discuss poems, testimonios, novels, and short stories in relation to center-periphery, cosmopolitan, and Internationalist paradigms.

Central American Literatures as World Literature explores the multiple ways in which Central American literature goes beyond or against the confines of the nation-state, especially through the indigenous, Black, and migrant voices.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: May 29th, 2025
  • Pages: 280
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 1.00in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9781501391910
  • Categories: Caribbean & Latin AmericanComparative Literature

About the Author

Beebee, Thomas Oliver: - Thomas O. Beebee is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (1990).

Praise for this book

"Central American Literatures as World Literature marks an important milestone in the opening up of Central American studies to a broader paradigm. Its contributors discuss some of Central America's most renowned authors as well as lesser known but increasingly important Black, Indigenous, queer, and immigrant writers. This book draws us away from the narrow nationalist frameworks that have dominated our understanding of Central American society and moves us toward the pluricultural realities and diverse Indigenous cosmologies of the region. I applaud the editor and the contributors for producing a volume that showcases the richness of Central American literature and its diaspora." --Nanci Buiza, Associate Professor of Spanish, Swarthmore College, USA

"This book is a passionate reflection of Central American literature's participation in the construction of world ideas, anchored in the isthmus' diverse cultural constellations and in the routes of travel, exile and migration. It shows brilliantly how precarious cultural fields can intervene in the redefining of world literature." --Mónica Albizúrez, Lecturer of Spanish and Latin American Literature, Universität Hamburg, Germany