Latin American Afterlives

This volume investigates the afterlives of British Romantic poets in the Hispanophone world with an emphasis on Latin American authors. Reframing the outdated model of a European center and a New World periphery, we ask the following questions: To what extent has translation shaped or impeded the dissemination of otherwise global Romantic texts throughout countries like Argentina, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela? How do Latin American reinterpretations of Romantic texts assume or elide the colonial burdens of influence from English works, as compared to those imposed by continental Spanish texts? How do Latin American writers negotiate their position in relation to a European literary and cultural canon? And in what ways do these Anglo-Latino interactions differ from those recently explored in transatlantic studies, of North America, the West Indies and the Black Atlantic? Featuring paired essays on Byron, Shelley, and Keats, we trace afterlives anchored around the three major second-generation poets. Their points of connection with the Luso-Hispanic world are prominent writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitanism bridge the British Isles with Central and South America, as well as with Spain. The following studies compose a collection of echoes, reflections, and translations of the English Romantics in Spanish and Portuguese. The works of José Marmol, Manuel Antônio Álvares de Azevedo, Martín Zapata, Luis Cernuda, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar constitute the tiles of this multicolored mosaic.