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This volume provides a basis for the comparative study of literature of the United States and Spanish America. Previous studies in comparative literature have stressed the influence of Europe on the United States or on Latin America as the creator of the 'New World'. In this book, the editors argue the necessity of a comparative study of the relation between literatures of North, Central, and South America. The first part looks at literature and the historical imagination; the second section focuses on the voice and vision of women; and the final essays are devoted to perspectives on literary criticism. Together the essays discuss the work of prominent Spanish American novelists such as Pablo Armando Fernandez, Luisa Valensuela, Edmundo Desnoes, Neruda, Paz and Borges as well as writers from the United States including Melville, Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.

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• Preface
• Part I History and the Literary Imagination
• 1 Introduction
• 2 'Insatiable Unease': Melville and Carpentier and the search for an American hermeneutic
• 3 The fiction of national formation: The Indigenista novels of
• 4 Supplying demand: Walt Whitman as the liberal self
• 5 Caliban as poet: Reversing the maps of domination
• 6 Mrs Williams's
• 7 Dreams of Two Americas Pablo
• Part II The Lives and Fictions of American Women
• 8 Introduction Bell
• 9 This life within me won't keep still
• 10 Interview with Margaret Randall
• 11 An invitation to understanding among poor women of the Americas: The Color Purple and Hasta No verte
• 12 The other face of the phallus
• 13 Plotting women: Popular narratives for women in the United States and in Latin America
• Part III Perspectives on Literary Criticism
• 14 Introduction
• 15 Northrop Frye, modern fantasy, centrist liberalism, antimarxism, passing time and other limits of American academic criticism
• 16 Marvelous relaism/marvelous criticsm
• 17 Bridge over troubled waters
• 18 The poet as critics
• Index

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CHOICE Review

This volume of essays should be termed socio-literary criticism; there is an emphasis on the plight of creative women on both continents, and the collection is not without a certain deference to Marxist theory (e.g., ``The bleak, brutal Manchester of Marx and Engels was a hopeful and civilized place by comparison to the Guatemalas of today''). More than half of the contributors are women, and many of the articles are comparisons of North and South American (but not Brazilian) writers, such as Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana de la Cruz; Alice Walker and Elena Poniatowska; Wallace Stevens and Octavio Paz; Herman Melville and Alejo Carpentier. Two items are especially interesting. One is the essay exploring the Hispanic background of William Carlos Williams. The other is an interview with Margaret Randall, who, always with a sharp ear to the ground, reflects upon her experience living in Mexico during the 1960s, Cuba during the 1970s, and Nicaragua during the early 1980s. Promising but less accessible is the essay on Walt Whitman's triple legacy to Spanish America though the divergent channels (left, right, and center) of Neruda, Borges, and Paz. The collection is given a remarkable coherence by the excellent introductory material provided for each of the book's three main divisions. There has been a lack of comparative study between the Americas, but the many thorny questions posed here are likely to inspire further work. Appropriate for students at graduate and upper-division undergraduate levels.-J. Shreve, Allegany Community College