The Aesthetic Border

This groundbreaking study examines how modern Colombian literaturefrom Gabriel Garca Mrquez to Juan Gabriel Vsquezreflects one of the worlds most tumultuous entrances into globalization. While these literary icons, one canonical, the other emergent, bookend Colombias fall and rise on the world stage, the period between the two was inordinately violent, spanning the Colombian urban novels evolution into narco-literature. Marking Colombias cultural and literary manifestations as threefold, this book explores Garca Mrquezs retreat to a rural romanticism that paradoxically made him a global literary icon; the countrys violent end to the twentieth century when its largest economic export was narcotics; and the contemporary period in which a new major author has emerged to create a literature of national reconstitution. Harkening back to the Regeneration movement and extending through the early twenty-first century, this book analyzes the cultural implications of Colombias relationship to the wider world.