This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature—from Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez to Juan Gabriel VÁsquez—reflects one of the world’s most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia’s fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel’s evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia’s cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores GarcÍa MÁrquez’s retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country’s violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a “literature of national reconstitution.” Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia’s relationship to the wider world.

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literature-from Gabriel GarcIa MArquez to Juan Gabriel VAsquez-reflects one of the world's most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombia's fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novel's evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombia's cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores GarcIa MArquez's retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the country's violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a "literature of national reconstitution." Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombia's relationship to the wider world.

Caught between the well-worn grooves the Boom and the Gen-X have left on the Latin American literary canon, the writing intellectuals that comprise what the Generation of '72 have not enjoyed the same editorial acclaim or philological framing as the literary cohorts that bookend them. In sociopolitical terms, they neither fed into the Cold War-inflected literary prizes that sustained the Boom nor the surge in cultural capital in Latin American cities from which the writers associated with the Crack and McOndo have tended to write. This book seeks to approach the Generation of '72 from the perspective of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, a theoretical framework that lends a fresh and critical architecture to the unique experiences and formal responses of a group of intellectuals that wrote alongside globalization's first wave.