Early Spanish American Narrative

This is a companion volume to Lindstrom’s Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction (University of Texas Press, 1994); together the set provides an excellent coverage of the prose narrative in Spanish America since the early nineteenth-century independence movements that created the dozen and a half national literatures of the Spanish-speaking Latin American region. Like all such volumes, Lindstrom has staked out important parameters. In the case of the nineteenth century, because of the often rather vague notion of what constitutes fiction (and especially what constitutes the novel), the decision is to focus on the broader concept of narrative. This decision allows her to include chronicles, local-color sketches, and other so-called mixed-genre creations such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s historical/biographical/sociological treatise Facundo (also known as Civilización i barbarie), which, nevertheless, has had such a signal influence on Argentine fiction. It does not, however, lead her...