El país bajo mi piel


Book Description




El país bajo mi piel / The Country Under My Skin


Book Description

Tras casarse muy jóven y ser madre, Gioconda Belli se unió al clandestino y emergente movimiento Sandinista, sustituyendo su deseo de ser una buena esposa por la necesidad de vivir una vida plena y comprometida con los cambios sociales en su país. Irónicamente, su pertenencia a la burguesía y su carrera como poeta renombrada, le brindaron la fachada que le permitió funcionar, secretamente, como rebelde. Desde su infancia en Managua y sus encuentros iniciales con poetas y revolucionarios, a persecuciones urbanas, reuniones con Fidel Castro, relaciones amorosas truncadas por la muerte o el exilio en México y Costa Rica, hasta su inesperado matrimonio con un periodista norteamericano, la historia de Gioconda Belli es tanto la de una mujer que se descubre a sí misma, como la de una nación que forja su destino. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION "A passionate, lyrical, tough-minded account of an extraordinary life in art, revolution, and love. It's a book to relish, to read and re-read. Unforgettable." --Salmon Rushdie An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer (“A wonderfully free and original talent”—Harold Pinter) and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution. Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels. Her memoir is both a revelatory insider’s account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.




Sandino's Nation


Book Description

Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez are two of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Addressing Nicaragua's struggle for self-definition from divergent ethnic, religious, generational, political, and class backgrounds, they constructed distinct yet compatible visions of national history, anchored in a reappraisal of the early twentieth-century insurgent leader Augusto César Sandino. During the Sandinista Revolution of 1979-90, Cardenal, appointed Nicaragua's minister of culture, became one of the most provocative and internationally recognized figures of liberation theology, while Ramírez, a member of the revolutionary junta, and later elected vice-president of Nicaragua, emerged as an authoritative figure for third world nationalism. But before all else, the two were groundbreaking creative writers. Through a close reading of the works by Nicaragua's best-known and most prolific modern authors, Sandino's Nation studies the construction of Nicaraguan national identity during three distinct periods of the country’s recent history - before, during, and after the 1979-90 revolution. Stephen Henighan offers rigorous textual analyses of poems, memoirs, essays, and novels, interwoven with a sharply narrated history of Nicaragua. The only comprehensive study of the careers of Cardenal and Ramírez, Sandino's Nation is essential to understanding transformations to both Nicaragua and the role of the writer in Latin America.




World Literature in Spanish [3 volumes]


Book Description

Containing roughly 850 entries about Spanish-language literature throughout the world, this expansive work provides coverage of the varied countries, ethnicities, time periods, literary movements, and genres of these writings. Providing a thorough introduction to Spanish-language literature worldwide and across time is a tall order. However, World Literature in Spanish: An Encyclopedia contains roughly 850 entries on both major and minor authors, themes, genres, and topics of Spanish literature from the Middle Ages to the present day, affording an amazingly comprehensive reference collection in a single work. This encyclopedia describes the growing diversity within national borders, the increasing interdependence among nations, and the myriad impacts of Spanish literature across the globe. All countries that produce literature in Spanish in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia are represented, covering both canonical authors and emerging contemporary writers and trends. Underrepresented writings—such as texts by women writers, queer and Afro-Hispanic texts, children's literature, and works on relevant but less studied topics such as sports and nationalism—also appear. While writings throughout the centuries are covered, those of the 20th and 21st centuries receive special consideration.




Practicing Memory in Central American Literature


Book Description

Through penetrating analysis of twentieth-century historical fiction from Central America this book asks: why do so many literary texts in the region address historical issues? What kinds of stories are told about the past when authors choose the fictional realm to represent history? Why access memory through fiction and poetry? Nicole Caso traces the active interplay between language, space, and memory in the continuous process of defining local identities through literature. Ultimately, this book looks to the dynamic between form and content to identify potential maps that are suggested in each of these texts in order to imagine possibilities of action in the future.




Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater


Book Description

The Historical Dictionary of Latin American Literature and Theater provides users with an accessible single-volume reference tool covering Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the 16 Spanish-speaking countries of continental Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela). Entries for authors, ranging from the early colonial period to the present, give succinct biographical data and an account of the author's literary production, with particular attention to their most prominent works and where they belong in literary history. The introduction provides a review of Latin American literature and theater as a whole while separate dictionary entries for each country offer insight into the history of national literatures. Entries for literary terms, movements, and genres serve to complement these commentaries, and an extensive bibliography points the way for further reading. The comprehensive view and detailed information obtained from all these elements will make this book of use to the general-interest reader, Latin American studies students, and the academic specialist.




Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018: Volume 5


Book Description

How do we address the idea of the literary now at the end of the second decade in the 21st century? Many traditional categories obscure or overlook significant contemporary forms of cultural production. This volume looks at literature and culture in general in this hinge period. Latin American Literature in Transition 1980-2018 examines the ways literary culture complicates national or area studies understandings of cultural production. Topics point to fresh, intersectional understandings of cultural practice, while keeping in mind the ongoing stakes in a struggle over material and intangible cultural and political borders that are being reinforced in formidable ways.




Modernity at Gunpoint


Book Description

2019 Best Book in the Humanities (Mexico section) of the Latin American Studies Association Modernity at Gunpoint provides the first study of the political and cultural significance of weaponry in the context of major armed conflicts in Mexico and Central America. In this highly original study, Sophie Esch approaches political violence through its most direct but also most symbolic tool: the firearm. In novels, songs, and photos of insurgency, firearms appear as artifacts, tropes, and props, through which artists negotiate conceptions of modernity, citizenship, and militancy. Esch grounds her analysis in important re-readings of canonical texts by Martín Luis Guzman, Nellie Campobello, Omar Cabezas, Gioconda Belli, Sergio Ramirez, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and others. Through the lens of the iconic firearm, Esch relates the story of the peasant insurgencies of the Mexican Revolution, the guerrilla warfare of the Sandinista Revolution, and the ongoing drug-related wars in Mexico and Central America, to highlight the historical, cultural, gendered, and political significance of weapons in this volatile region.




Gender for the Warfare State


Book Description

Gender for the Warfare State is the first scholarly investigation into the written works of U.S. women combat veterans in twenty-first century wars. Most recent studies quantify military participation, showing how many women participate in armed services and what their experiences are in a traditionally “male institution.” Many of these treatments regard women as victims solely of enemy fire, even as they are also often victims of their own military apparatus and of their own involvement in global aggression. By applying literary analysis to a sociological question, Gender for the Warfare State views women’s experiences through story and literary traditions that carry meaning into present practices. Goodman shows that women in combat are not just entering and being victimized in “male institutions,” but are also actively changing the story of gender and thus the structure of power that is constructed through gender. Moreover, this book unveils a new narrative of care that affects economic relations more broadly and the contemporary politics of the liberal social contract. Women’s participation in combat is not just a U.S. event but global and therefore has a deeper historical range than current sociological accounts imply. The book compares the political contexts of women’s entry into war now with their prior, twentieth-century contributions to wars in other cultural settings and then uses this comparison to show a variety of meanings at play in the gender of war.




Writing Women in Central America


Book Description

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about the past? This study explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.