Cuba and the Tempest

Synopsis

In a unique analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, Eduardo Gonzalez looks closely at the work of three of the most important contemporary Cuban authors to write in the post-1959 diaspora: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005), who left Cuba for good in 1965 and established himself in London; Antonio Benitez-Rojo (1931-2005), who settled in the United States; and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba. Through the positive experiences of exile and wandering that appear in their work, these three writers exhibit what Gonzalez calls "Romantic authorship," a deep connection to the Romantic spirit of irony and complex sublimity crafted in literature by Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Gonzalez's view, a writer becomes a belated Romantic by dint of exile adopted creatively with comic or tragic irony. Gonzalez weaves into his analysis related cinematic elements of myth, folktale, and the grotesque that appear in the work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almodovar. Placing the three Cuban writers in conversation with artists and thinkers from British and American literature, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cinema, Gonzalez ultimately provides a space in which Cuba and its literature, inside and outside its borders, are deprovincialized.

Copyright:

2006

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780807877135

Related ISBNs:

9780807830154, 9780807856833

Publisher:

The University of North Carolina Press

Date of Addition:

01/05/16

Copyrighted By:

The University of North Carolina Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.