The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature

The first book in English to tell the intricate story of Cuban literary-intellectual culture from the seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century.

Vicky Unruh (Edited by), Jacqueline Loss (Edited by)

9781009168342, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2024

816 pages
23.6 x 15.9 x 4.1 cm, 1.41 kg

Extending from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature is the first book in English to tell the intricate story of Cuban literary-intellectual culture from the seventeenth-century to the twenty-first century. This landmark book highlights the intricacies of linguistic and cultural translation embodied in telling a story in English about a body of work expressed predominantly in Spanish, but also French, Haitian Kreyòl, Angolan Portuguese, and English. Broad in its scope, this book encompasses such major figures as Gómez de Avellaneda, Heredia, Plácido, Manzano, Villaverde, Martí, Casal, Carpentier, L. Cabrera, Mañach, Loynaz, Piñera, Lezama Lima, and Cabrera Infante, as well as theatre and performance groups, film, post-revolutionary projects, post-1989 Special Period writers, and literature of Cuba's diasporas. It highlights four key features weaving through Cuban literary history: its engagement with international networks; its key role in cultural identity debates throughout Latin America; persistent debates about race, gender, and class; and the tropes of travel and movement—voluntary, exploratory, enslaved, migratory, or exilic.

Introduction: unfinished histories
Part I. Literature in the Early Colony: 1. Silvestre de Balboa's Espejo de paciencia and the unfinished foundational story of Cuban literature
2. José Martín Félix de Arrate's enlightenment discourse of Cuban exceptionalism
Part II. Cuban Literature's Long Nineteenth Century: 3. Alexander von Humboldt and the cultural invention of Cuba among its nineteenth-century intellectual elite
4. Philosophy and pedagogy in Varela, Luz y Caballero, and Varona
5. Mercedes Merlin and the rhetoric of life writing, exile, and race
6. The lyric vernacular of Cuban romanticism
7. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as literary precursor and transatlantic intellectual
8. Racialized futures: Slavery, miscegenation, and speculative literature
9. Journalism and nineteenth-century literary culture
10. José Martí as hemispheric visionary
11. Julian del Casal and the other faces of Cuban Modernismo
12. Performance worlds of nineteenth-century Cuban theatre
Part III. Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic: 13. The literary intellectuals of the early Cuban republic
14. The invention of the Black Cuban in the early twentieth century
15. The fluid expressive communities of Cuba's interwar avant-gardes
16. Lydia Cabrera and Afro-Caribbean imaginaries
17. The fictions of new urban subjects
18. The aesthetics of Dulce María Loynaz
19. José Lezama Lima and the orbits of Orígenes
20. Alejo Carpentier and Cuba's literary twentieth century
21. The weighted literary islands of Virgilio Piñera
Part IV. The Revolution's Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents: 22. Beginnings: testimonios, experimentalism, and their legacies
23. Imagining Cuba's new revolutionary communities through film (1959–1989)
24. Shaping new cultural literacies
25. The social life of music in Cuban literary culture
26. Casa de las Américas and revolutionary configurations of Latinoamericanismo
27. The travels of fiction in the Cuban diaspora
28. Cuba's poetic imaginary (1959–1989)
29. The artistic worlds of Guillermo Cabrera Infante
30. The diasporic odysseys of Reinaldo Arenas and his writing
Part V. Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium: 31. Alternative cultural projects and their histories
32. Ediciones Vigía and the cultural legacies of Matanzas
33. The fiction of Cuba's special period
34. Critique and decentralization in Cuban film after 1989
35. The temporality of twentieth and twenty-first century Cuban theatre
36. The long reach of Haiti in Cuban literature
37. Cuban afterlives of the Cuban and Angolan revolutions
38. Anti-exceptionalism in detective fiction, speculative fiction, and graphic novels
39. Cuban women's writing at the millennium's turn
40. Queering the revolution and its diasporas
41. The performance art of global Cuba
42. Twenty-first-century Cuban film and diaspora
43. Cuba's poetic imaginary (1989–2020)
44. Prose narratives from Cuban America
45. Cuban theatre of the diaspora in the United States
Epilogue: 46. Teleology, tempests, and voicings of history.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]