Hearts of Darkness: The Celebration of Otherness in the Latin Americannovela de la selva

Autor: Lesley Wylie
Rok vydání: 2005
Předmět:
Zdroj: Romance Studies. 23:105-116
ISSN: 1745-8153
0263-9904
DOI: 10.1179/026399005x58805
Popis: This article examines the role of the early twentieth-century novela de la selva in the imaginative reconfiguration of post-independent Latin America. Despite the genre's apparent complicity in traditional representations of American nature in travel writing, the novela de la selva can also be read as an example of what Homi K. Bhabha has termed 'colonial mimicry', where (post)colonial subjects engage with the terms of the colonizer to produce a powerful counter-discourse. With reference to an important precursor of these novels, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this paper will discuss how formerly disabling stereotypes of Otherness and savagery are intensified and adopted as empowering postcolonial concepts in two emblematic Latin American Jungle Novels, Jose Eustasio Rivera's La voragine and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos.
Databáze: OpenAIRE