Gathered in one volume are seven of the best essays written in the last fifteen years or so by the eminent Latin Americanist Enrico Mario Santí. The essays cover a wide range of topics in Latin American poetry, narrative, film, and intellectual history and also explore Spanish Peninsular subject-matter: the Spanish Generation of 98's response to Spain's loss of Cuba in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The essays are introduced by a long text in which the author develops a bracing critique of some dominant trends in current critical practice, and spells out an alternative methodology.

Autorentext
ENRICO MARIO SANTI is William T. Bryan Professor of Hispanic Studies and the University of Kentucky, USA. He serves on editorial boards of a dozen scholarly journals, among them Hispanic Review, the flagship of the field, and on the Research Council of the Center for a Free Cuba, a Washington, D.C. think tank. His research has been supported over the years by fellowships from The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Inhalt
Introduction Poetry and the Cold War: Pablo Neruda's "Canto General" This Land of Prophets: Walt Whitman in Spanish America Sor Juana, Octavio Paz and Poetics of Restitution Through the Grapevine: Rulfo, Garro and National Allegory 98: Narcissism and Melancholy After the Revolution: Strawberry and Chocolate, or the Politics of Reconciliation Fernando Ortiz: Counterpoint and Transculturation Appendix 1: Latinamericanism Appendix 2: The Neruda Whitmaniana