Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #294

by Rolena Adorno

A vivid account of the literary culture of the Spanish-speaking Americas from the time of Columbus to Latin American Independence, this Very Short Introduction explores the origins of Latin American literature in Spanish and tells the story of how Spanish literary language developed and flourished in the New World. A leading scholar of colonial Latin American literature, Rolena Adorno examines the writings that debated the justice of the Spanish conquests, described the novelties of New World nature, expressed the creativity of Hispanic baroque culture in epic, lyric, and satirical poetry, and anticipated Latin American Independence. The works of Spanish, creole, and Amerindian authors highlighted here, including Bartolome de las Casas, Felipe Guaman Poma, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Andres Bello, have been chosen for the merits of their writings, their participation in the larger literary and cultural debates of their times, and their resonance among readers today.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literature, History, Literary Criticism, Collections, American, Audiobook

167 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 7, 2011

Reviews

[Joanne McGowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoy the Oxford Very Short Introduction series, I have read and also enjoyed Modern Latin American Literature and Spanish Literature: A Very Short Introduction but this one is less thematic and is organised much more neatly according to the authors and their works.

This book also defines Literature more broadly than the other two, including works such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, José de Acosta among others.
It includes works written in Spanish, some Latin and occasional French but strangely enough it has no mention of any Portuguese language works.

All in all a good book, for anyone interested in the literary culture of the Spanish speaking Americas from the time of Columbus right up to the Latin American Independence.

[Zuberino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read quite a few books on Colonial Latin America in recent months - Garcia Marquez, a couple of Carpentiers - this seemed like a good time to pick up Rolena Adorno's book on the literature of that era. The companion volume in the VSI series, Gonzalez Echevarria on Modern Latin American Literature, was a genuine eye-opener for me, and this book too strives to do its capacious subject some justice within its slender confines.
As per Adorno, the discoverer himself dispatched the first literary work on Latin America - Columbus and his 1493 "Letter of Discovery". In the following chapters, we meet some of the best-known writers of the next three centuries. Bartolome de las Casas, whose "Destruction of the Indies" is dubbed "the most infamous book of the entire Spanish colonial period". Hernan Cortes, whose conqueror's account of the overthrow of the Aztec Empire is challenged (or complemented?) by Bernal Diaz's "Conquest of New Spain", the view of an ordinary foot soldier in the colonizing army. There is an excellent chapter on the polemics of possession - how religious scholars and philosophers had to twist and turn to justify wars of conquest against a peaceable native population, by inventing casus belli such as purported cannibalism and human sacrifice. Did the Treaty of Tordesillas (splitting South America between Spain and Portugal) only allow for evangelical work by missionaries, or did it actually authorize aggression? Such was the degree of unhelpful disputation, of scholarly argument and counter-argument, that eventually Charles V decided to shut down their colloquy, as it "presented more problems than it resolved".
Something of an aside then: a chapter on the explorer Cabeza de Vaca whose epic adventures across two continents have inspired generations of writers and scholars since, most recently Laila Lalami's Booker- and Pulitzer-nominated novel The Moor's Account, which tracks Cabeza de Vaca's peregrinations through the eyes of the slave Estevanico, one of the first blacks, and also one of the first Muslims, to widely explore the new continent. There is a look at the polemics of resistance: Ercilla's "Araucana", and El Inca Garcilaso's account, in polished Castilian, of the demise of the native civilization whose very name he carries. And then, at last, we get to the Baroque of the Indies which, to my mind, is the region's most original and attractive cultural contribution.
There is a wonderful comment by Carlos Fuentes in his interview with the Paris Review, where he says: "There is a culture of the Caribbean, I would say, that includes Faulkner, Carpentier, García Márquez, Derek Walcott, and Aimé Césaire, a trilingual culture in and around the whirlpool of the baroque which is the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico." Once you have immersed yourself in the literature - in the rococo phrasings of Marquez and Carpentier, in the fluid verses of Walcott - once you have experienced the land itself, stunned by the tropic sun in old Havana or mesmerized by the sheer exuberance of nature on the wild coast of Colombia, you finally begin to understand something of the astonishing fecundity of a relatively tiny region that has given us no fewer than six Nobel Prize winners, if you also include Naipaul and Asturias and Saint John Perse. Adorno considers Sor Juana in this vein, the mother-poet of an entire continent.
And so to the final lap, the age of independence, seen primarily through the works of Fray Servando and Andres Bello. Two names that I had NOT known before particularly caught my eye: Oviedo, whom Adorno calls the finest nature writer of the new continent, and Guaman Poma whose 800-page chronicle sounds like a work of great intrigue.

Urban baroque Oquendo lima Guaman poma inca spectacular autograph ms’s Freile bogota carnero Caviedes lima
High baroque Balbuena father of Barocco Indios Medrano Lunarejo Sor Juana supreme poetess Siguenza Gongora
Independencia Vandera Clavigero Fray Servando Andres Bello repossess the language

[Danny Batten · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accesible little volume. it is quite thorough (for a slight 120ish pages) in its exemplar-based approach to the subject: Adorno walks the reader through the major movements and key works/authors and situates them nearly both in their particular moment and in relation to others (in LA and the peninsula).

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The literary scholar Rolena Adorno published Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction in 2011. The book is mostly about literature from the Spanish colonies in Latin America. The book covers the era between the exploration of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s and the independence of Spanish-speaking Latin America in the 19th Century. The book has illustrations, including maps. The book includes a section of references. The book consists of a section of “further reading” (Adorno 133-138). The book has an index. I learned a great deal from Adorno’s book. Adorno writes, “the colonial writers’ capacity for observation, interpretation, synthesis, and engaging expression about a world unknown by Europe” (Adorno 3). Adorno writes that these qualities make colonial writing “that make colonial writings worth reading, and it makes them literary” (Adorno 3). The book examines colonial Latin American writers and includes the writings of explorers and conquistadors such as Christopher Columbus (Adorno 12-13). The first chapter is an introduction to the field of Colonial Latin American literature from the colonies of Spain. The rest of the book chronically follows the literature of Colonial Latin America. The book defines Baroque literature (Adorno 77-78). Colonial Latin American writers contributed to Baroque literature (Adorno 77-78). I read the book on my Kindle. Adorno’s book was a well-done introduction to Colonial Latin American Literature from the colonies of Spain.