Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America: 37 (FlashPoints) - Softcover

Victoria Saramago (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810142597 ISBN 13: 9780810142596

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2020

Synopsis

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by JoĆo GuimarĆes Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

About this title

About the Author

Victoria Saramago is an assistant professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies at the University of Chicago.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810142597
• ISBN 13: 9780810142596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288