From Booklist
This ambitious set features 205 signed articles from 242 scholars in 22 countries and claims to be "the largest comparative history project in the world." It covers five centuries of various multidisciplinary aspects (including historical, political, social, economical, and geographical) of Latin American culture on the grounds that literature responds to and enriches the culture from which it derives. The scope of Latin American literature here is extremely broad and expands on the traditional canon to include marginal authors and Brazilian literature, although English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking cultures of the Caribbean are mostly excluded. The three volumes have separate, broad motifs. Volume 1, Configurations of Literary Culture, gives a framework for cultural production, including exclusionary barriers, and an overview of popular culture. Volume 2, Institutional Modes and Cultural Modalities, maps out the cultural concentrations of the production of literature (including literary forms and geographic cultural centers). Volume 3 is titled Latin American Literary Culture: Subject to History. Within volumes, articles are grouped in thematic sections such as "Linguistic Diversity of Latin American Cultures," "The Novel," and "Amerindian Literary Cultures." Article length generally ranges from 5 to 30 pages, and each article has its own bibliography. More than 251 black-and-white illustrations (including maps and charts) accompany the text. The set concludes with a list of contributors and a broad subject index. Also, there is a list of included people with birth and death dates, but since this gives no page references and some people listed aren't in the subject index, it isn't very helpful. The essays are somewhat arcane and not traditionally organized, so it will be difficult for people without advanced background knowledge of Latin American studies to find what they need. There is some overlap, though not a lot, with The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (Cambridge, 1996), but that work is more traditionally arranged. The editors of the present work strived to make it complementary to, rather than a rival of, the Cambridge resource. Because of the advanced language and subject matter, this title is only recommended for large research libraries and those with Latin American studies programs. Susan Gardner
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SYNOPSIS

Written by an international group of contributors, this monumental three-volume work presents 205 essays comprising critical assessments of a wide variety of Latin American writing from a staunchly contextual standpoint. Volume 1 is on the relation of writing to geography, culture, and social discourse. Among the topics are the writing and culture of areas including the Andean countries, Brazil, and the Amazon; linguistic diversity; writers from the margins, such as poverty, Mayan, Andean indigenous writers, and several essays on women writers; and various types of literature. Volume 2 is devoted to culture and institutions and how these contribute to writing. Essays are included on books and presses, museums, education, literary periodicals, and the writing produced in specific cultural locales, particularly cities. The final volume examines writings from various historic moments and includes such topics as the discourses of modernity, the first encounter of Europeans and the New World, the Baroque gaze, the Brazilian construction of nationalism, and literatures of Mesoamerica. The project, which was ten years in the making, was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the U. of Toronto as part of their Literary History Project, of which Vald￯﾿ﾽs is research director. Kadir teaches comparative literature at Penn State U. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

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