1
I am grateful to Fiona Mackintosh for an invitation to present an early version of this paper to the Spanish and Portuguese Research Seminar of the University of Edinburgh, and to Edwin Williamson and Jacqueline Rattray for an invitation to present a later version to the Spanish Research Seminar of the University of Oxford. Thanks are due to members of both seminars for their comments, particularly to Dominic Moran at Oxford.
2
See e. g. Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 175-202; Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 197-235.
3
«The Boom of the Latin American Novel», in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, ed. by Efraín Kristal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 59-80 (p. 63).
4
La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Joaquín Moritz, 1969), p. 30.
5
Contra viento y marea (1962-1982) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983), p. 134.
6
Sons of the Wind: The Search for Identity in Spanish American Indian Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982), p. 279.
7
Journeys through the Labyrinth, p. 197.
8
Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo (Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Mexico City: Paidós, 2002), p. 38. Subsequent references will be given in the body of the text, preceded by LBL.
9
«The new culture will be national instead of cosmopolitan; it will focus on the nation's history and on the development of the national character; it will take into account the different geographical regions, races, and languages of Nicaragua. The new culture will be anti-imperialist in rejecting US culture imports such as "disco", Star Wars, "Dallas", Reader's Digest, Playboy. It will replace them with the folklore and folk art of Nicaragua and the rest of Central America» (Donald C. Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 261).
10
Ramírez served as a member of Nicaragua's governing Junta, 1979-85, and as Vice-President, 1985-90.