num_pages: 200
description: "Provides the reader with a clear understanding of art in general, and prose fiction in particular, in Mexico and the Western world in our century. [The author’s] commentaries on the modern and the postmodern are insightful, refreshing, and informative. . . . An indispensable companion to any serious study of contemporary Spanish American literature."--Alfonso González, California State University, Los Angeles Fernando del Paso (b. 1935) is one of Mexico’s most prestigious living authors. In this first book-length comparative study, Robin W. Fiddian evaluates Del Paso’s relationships to Mexican, Spanish American, European, and North American narrative traditions, placing him in the context of other Latin American writers like Fuentes, Cortázar, and García Márquez.Looking in particular at the pattern of evolution of four novels-- Jose Trigo, Palinuro de Mexico, Noticias del Imperio , and Linda 67 , Fiddian argues that the works demonstrate the triumph of a modernist style of writing in Spanish American fiction of the midcentury and its subsequent eclipse by postmodern paradigms. Fiddian also addresses issues of cultural identity and independence that are relevant both within and beyond the national boundaries of Mexico. As well as providing the most comprehensive coverage yet of Del Paso’s impressive writing, the book can be read as a case study of the application of postmodern and postcolonial theories to the literary cultures of all developing nations. Robin W. Fiddian, Reader in Spanish at Oxford University and a Fellow of Wadham College, is the editor of Gabriel García Márquez and coeditor of Sound on Essays on Contemporary Spanish Cinema.
language: English
title: The Novels of Fernando del Paso
titlecomplete: The Novels of Fernando del Paso
publisher: University Press of Florida