| Popis: |
This chapter offers information on how novels were developed and circulated in colonial Spanish America. It studies known works of the genre while bringing to the fore others rediscovered and printed contemporaneously. It discusses several obstacles to the production of novels: civil and religious censorship, a limited reading public, emphasis of colonial printing presses on publishing religious books, and competition from well-known Spanish authors whose books were distributed in the New World. Embedded in European literary traditions, novels were slowly marked by American contextual concerns, and their hybrid nature soon became apparent. With tensions between the old and the new, the friction of metropolitan taste and criollo wit, and the inclusion or exclusion of nuanced rhetorical patterns as well as of unique social subjects, a different literary sensibility began to develop. The ensuing cultural shifts paved the way for the development of the modern Spanish American novel. |
