Road trips loom large in the American imagination, and stories from the road have been central to crafting national identities across North and South America. Tales of traversing this vast geography, with its singular landscape, have helped foster a sense of American exceptionalism. Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War John Ochoa pursues literary travelers across landscapes and centuries. At each historical crossroads, the nations of North and South invented or reinvented themselves in the shadow of empire. Travel accounts from these periods offered master narratives that shaped the notion of America's postimperial future.Fellow Travelers recounts the complex, on-the-road relationships between travelers such as Lewis and Clark, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimei Bonpland, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the Che Guevara and Alberto Granado of The Motorcycle Diaries. Such journeys reflect concerns far larger than their characters: tensions between the voices of the rugged individual and the democratic many, between the metropolis and the backcountry, and between the intimate and the vast. Working across national literatures, Fellow Travelers offers insight into a shared process of national reinvention and the construction of modern national imaginaries.

Honoring the lifework of the comparative literature scholar, From the Americas to the World: Essays in Honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora traces artistic and cultural pathways that connect Latin American literature and culture to the Americas, and to the world beyond. The essays in this collection cover three critical fields: comparative hemispheric American literature, magical realism, and the Baroque/New World Baroque/Neobaroque. Beginning with a critical reassessment of hemispheric American studies, these essays analyze the works of a wide array of writers, such as Roberto Bolano, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Waldo Frank, and Jose Lez. These chapters build upon the legacy of the scholarship done by Dr. Zamora and exemplify the pattern of literary studies that she has driven forward.

Road trips loom large in the American imagination, and stories from the road have been central to crafting national identities across North and South America. Tales of traversing this vast geography, with its singular landscape, have helped foster a sense of American exceptionalism. Examining three turning points that shaped exceptionalism in both Americas the late colonial and early Republican period, expansion into the frontier, and the Cold War John Ochoa pursues literary travelers across landscapes and centuries. At each historical crossroads, the nations of North and South invented or reinvented themselves in the shadow of empire. Travel accounts from these periods offered master narratives that shaped the notion of America's postimperial future.Fellow Travelers recounts the complex, on-the-road relationships between travelers such as Lewis and Clark, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimei Bonpland, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Kerouac's Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the Che Guevara and Alberto Granado of The Motorcycle Diaries. Such journeys reflect concerns far larger than their characters: tensions between the voices of the rugged individual and the democratic many, between the metropolis and the backcountry, and between the intimate and the vast. Working across national literatures, Fellow Travelers offers insight into a shared process of national reinvention and the construction of modern national imaginaries.

Don Catrín de la Fachenda is a picaresque novel by the Mexican writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), best known as the author of El periquillo sarniento (The Itching Parrot), often called the first Latin American novel. Don Catrín is three things at once: a rakish pícaro in the tradition of the picaresque; a catrín, a dandy or fop; and a criollo, a person born in the New World and belonging to the same dominant class as their Spanish-born parents but relegated to a secondary status. The novel interrogates then current ideas about the supposed innateness of race and caste and plays with other aspects of the self considered more extrinsic, such as appearance and social disguise. While not directly mentioning the Mexican wars of independence, Don Catrín offers a vivid representation of the political and social frictions that burst into violence around 1810 and gave birth to the independent countries of Latin America.

Don Catrín de la Fachenda, here translated into English for the first time, is a picaresque novel by the Mexican writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), best known as the author of El periquillo sarniento (The Itching Parrot), often called the first Latin American novel. Don Catrín is three things at once: a rakish pícaro in the tradition of the picaresque; a catrín, a dandy or fop; and a criollo, a person born in the New World and belonging to the same dominant class as their Spanish-born parents but relegated to a secondary status. The novel interrogates then current ideas about the supposed innateness of race and caste and plays with other aspects of the self considered more extrinsic, such as appearance and social disguise. While not directly mentioning the Mexican wars of independence, Don Catrín offers a vivid representation of the political and social frictions that burst into violence around 1810 and gave birth to the independent countries of Latin America.