Central American Literatures As World Literature

Sophie Esch

A first-of-its-kind study on Central American literature that illuminates classics and highlights new pathways by exploring texts and writers that go beyond or against the confines of the nation-state. Both within Latin American literary and world literary production, Central American literature is often perceived as a marginal space. This collection seeks to challenge this notion and to position and discuss Central American literature within the recently revived debates on world literature. This groundbreaking volume draws on new scholarship on global, transnational, postcolonial, translational, and sociological perspectives on the region's literature, expanding and challenging these debates by focusing on the heterogenous literatures of Central America and its diasporas. Contributors discuss poems, testimonios, novels, and short stories in relation to center-periphery, cosmopolitan, and Internationalist paradigms. These essays explore the multiple ways in which Central American literature goes beyond or against the confines of the nation-state, especially through the indigenous, Black, and migrant voices.