Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This ambitious collection of 30 essays provides an extensive, intensive overview of Chilean writing since the Spanish conquest. In the introduction, Lopez-Calvo (Univ. of California, Merced) states that this "is the first English-language history of Chilean literature to bring together a comprehensive analysis of every period, from a variety of theoretical and thematic perspectives" (p. 2). The book discusses three periods: the "proto-Chilean," the 19th century, and the 20 and 21st centuries. Essays address the full spectrum of the Chilean experience, expanding understanding of Chilean literature to include indigenous and diasporic authors. Essays examine Mapuche poetry and aesthetics, women's writing, LGBTQ writers, Chilean American writers, and authors from Afro-Chilean, Jewish, Croatian, Asian, and Arabic communities in Chile. All the canonical authors--Alonso de Ercilla, Gabriela Mistral, Jose Donoso, Pablo Neruda, Roberto Bolano, Alejandro Zambra--are here with fresh readings, and there are introductions to overlooked subaltern voices and contemporary writers. The collection offers important essays on theater, film, digital literature, criticism, and memory. Lopez-Calvo accurately claims that this work "challenges previous binary debates and essentialist or nationalist paradigms" (p. 17) about what constitutes Chilean literature. This is an excellent, readable, teachable addition to Latin American literary studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students.

In Affective Geographies, Johnson (DePauw Univ.) links what French historian Fernand Braudel called "the Mediterranean world" with affect theory and with the works of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes's Mediterranean experience was perforce emotional, and the intersection of history and fiction is a guiding premise of this ambitious, engaging, and learned study. Cervantes explores and builds on literary topics, but his boundaries are never purely aesthetic. He exposes the Mediterranean to scrutiny from multiple vantage points. Johnson concentrates on the particular ways in which Cervantes portrays emotions and confrontations among individuals, within varying landscapes and with consequences that range from the serious to the satirical. Johnson is adept at distinguishing the portrayal of the inwardness and interiority of Cervantine characters from counterparts in 19th-century European realism. A highlight of the volume--one of many--is discussion of the encounter, in part 2 of Don Quixote, of Sancho Panza and the Morisco Ricote as a source of commentary on humor. Analyzing feelings is a challenge. Johnson has done his homework and far more. His approach to the Mediterranean takes the reader all over the map of criticism, metacriticism, interdisciplinarity, and the Cervantine corpus.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Arrested in 1942 by the Gestapo in Paris for her work in political resistance, Delbo was deported to, and survived, both Auschwitz and Ravensbruck. (Her husband was also arrested and later shot.) When she returned home after the war, she wrote a memoir but put it aside for two decades in order to assess, after time had passed, whether it was "the truth." She eventually published it, with two other pieces, as Auschwitz et apres (1970-71; Eng. tr., Auschwitz and After, 1995), and it is considered to be among the most profound and poetic memoirs in Holocaust literature. Dunant's is the first scholarly biography of Delbo, and it is here elegantly translated into English from the French. Durant covers Delbo's postwar years, her move to Switzerland and travels (Greece, Russia, the US), her numerous writing projects, and her disillusionment with communism and activism against the Algerian war. Dunant writes with deep appreciation and penetrating analysis about Delbo's Holocaust texts, noting their poetic voice, their fierce depiction of bodily and emotional suffering, and their revelations about Delbo's split identity as a survivor. Dunant also shares intimate information about Delbo in the years before her death in 1985: her deep friendships, her love affairs, and her purchase of a tiny railroad station as a country home (the irony of this for one deported by train is not lost on Dunant). Deeply researched and deeply empathetic, this is a spectacular biography.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Does Diderot (1713-84) have a particular affinity with the present time? Could the 21st century become, in terms of reception and resonance, the Age of Diderot, as the 19th was the Age of Voltaire and the 20th the Age of Rousseau? These questions drive this ambitious, erudite work by one of today's leading cultural historians and literary critics. Gumbrecht (emer., Stanford Univ.) attempts to elucidate a mystery he has considered for 50 years: the reasons behind the empathy Diderot's prose awakens in so many readers, including himself. In a clear though dense volume brimming with biographical anecdotes and absorbing analyses of key texts, Gumbrecht unpacks the obsessions, concerns, and intuitions of an irrepressible mind that always resisted categorization. His study rests on a paradoxical premise: Diderot's identity emerges from a lack of stable identity. As he reaches for a comprehensive description of the intellectual life and style of a mercurial author who rejected fixed contours and defining content, Gumbrecht sheds light on Diderot's exceptional "periphery," which included Lichtenberg, Goya, and Mozart. This is an insightful, compelling book. Readers seeking a biography of Diderot should go to Andrew Curran's Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (CH, Jul'19, 56-4265).Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty

Including original scholarly research, this rich, vibrant, insightful study offers an in-depth, wide-ranging examination of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature. Bell-Villada and Lopez-Calvo (Williams College; Univ. of California, Merced, respectively) organize the 32 essays into five parts: "Sociohistorical and Literary Backgrounds"; "Race, Ethnicity, and Gender"; "Worldwide Influences and Legacy"; "Key Themes and Leitmotifs"; and "Key Works." The collection focuses on both broad contexts and specific concerns and draws on Garcia Marquez's public speeches, newspaper articles, and screenwriting. The contributors, internationally renowned scholars, build on literary theories and criticism, including feminist theory, ecocriticism, and social scientific studies, among others. As expected, one focal point of the study is the author's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude (1969). Those interested in Garcia Marquez's work and Latin American literature in general will welcome this book, with its excellent, up-to-date research. The only missing element is a chronology.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.