Hardback - £97.00

Publication date:

18 July 2013

Length of book:

360 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611475890

This book broaches a comparative and interdisciplinary approach in its exploration of the phenomenon of the dictatorship in the Hispanic World in the twentieth century. Some of the themes explored through a transatlantic perspective include testimonial accounts of violence and resistance in prisons; hunger and repression; exile, silence and intertextuality; bildungsroman and the modification of gender roles; and the role of trauma and memory within the genres of the novel, autobiography, testimonial literature, the essay, documentaries, puppet theater, poetry, and visual art. By looking at the similarities and differences of dictatorships represented in the diverse landscapes of Latin America and Spain, the authors hope to provide a more panoramic view of the dictatorship that moves beyond historiographical accounts of oppression and engages actively in a more broad dialectics of resistance and a politics of memory.



Exceeding the normal scope of comparative and contrastive work, this volume contains essays which showcase the role of culture as a source of catharsis for traumatized writers, and an enabler of post-conflict resolution.... Overall, this is a coherent and admirably balanced set of essays that exemplifies the productiveness of the transnational and transatlantic approach, which enriches not only scholarly understanding of the convergences between cultures dealing with dictatorship and its aftermath, but also of writers’ multifarious difficulties and successes in articulating their dissent in highly repressive societies, and surprisingly, as the case of Reinaldo Arenas demonstrates, in democracies.