This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature-from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Juan Gabriel Vasquez-reflects one of the world's most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia's fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel's evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia's cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores Garcia Marquez's retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country's violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a "literature of national reconstitution." Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia's relationship to the wider world.

About the Author
BRANTLEY NICHOLSON is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Georgia College in Milledgeville. His research and teaching take up comparative-American studies and the theoretical questions of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and economics. His recent research has focused on post-national imaginaries in Chile and Colombia and the emergence of new global cities in the Andean region, such as Santiago, Bogota, and Medellin.


Reviews
"The Aesthetic Border follows critics working from a national tradition outwards to globalization and world literature, as opposed to others working on Latin America vis-a-vis the world. Engaging the works of representative authors, Nicholson brilliantly maps out the convergence and divergence of global and national discourses present in the Colombian literary canon."- Camilo Malagon, assistant professor of Spanish, Ithaca College
"Aesthetics/politics. Culture/economics. Poetics plus coffee-bananas-drugs. Local/global. Onto this complex backdrop, Nicholson ably unfolds a capacious account of Colombian writing-from before, during, and after the 'Gabo' phenomenon on through J. G. Vasquez's fiction. A solidly researched, broad-ranging look at a troubled nation's struggles for artistic expression and literary viability."- Gene Bell-Villada, editor of Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"El profesor B. Nicholson, conocedor como pocos de la Colombia profunda y escindida, ha logrado adentrarse en The Aesthetic Border: Colombian Literature in the Face of Globalization, con sagacidad investigadora, en los repliegues de la historia reciente que viene desde el asesinato del lider liberal Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (El Bogotazo, 1948) y sus impensables consecuencias politicas partidistas de las que todavia no se ha recuperado el pais."- Hispania




Book Information
ISBN 9781684483662
Author Brantley Nicholson
Format Hardback
Page Count 162
Imprint Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Publisher Bucknell University Press,U.S.
Weight(grams) 4g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 8mm