The Postmodern Novel and the Post-Boom in Latin America

• Main Authors: Medrano, José Manuel, Williams, Raymond L.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2022
• Subjects: Rivera; Yáñez; Huidobro; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197541852.013.8; https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/41985/chapter/355422530

Abstract The modern, postmodern, and post-Boom roots are found in various avant-garde Latin American fiction manifestations in the 1920s and 1930s. More specifically, scholars have pointed to the Semana de Arte Moderna in Brazil, as well as the fiction of Gilberto Owen and Jaime Torres Bodet in Mexico and Vicente Huidobro in Chile, in addition to a host of others who were the forerunners to the modern and postmodern novel in Latin America, which was produced from 1945 to 2015. The key connectors between the vanguardias and the rise of the modern novel were Jorge Luis Borges’s short story collection Ficciones (1944) and Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel El señor presidente (The President, 1946). The Latin American postmodern novel follows common patterns associated with the 1970s and 1980s North Atlantic postmodernism: disruption, discontinuity, decentering, dislocation, indeterminacy, and antilocalization. On the other hand, the novel of the post-Boom was a reaction precisely against the modern novel in Latin American associated with the 1960s Boom. Unlike the Boom writers in the late 1960s and the postmodern writers of the 1970s and 1980s, post-Boom writers rejected these novelists’ hyper-experimentation. After briefly reviewing the avant-gardes, as well as the terms “modern,” “postmodern,” and “post-Boom,” this essay covers Latin American fiction from Asturias and Agustín Yáñez in the 1940s, to Roberto Bolaño, to Cristina Rivera Garza, and Isabel Allende in the twentieth century, as well as their respective contemporaries.