Imagining Ecuador: Crisis, Transnationalism and Contemporary Fiction (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781855663589)

How are contemporary authors reimagining the idea of 'Ecuador' following the worst financial crisis in the nation's history, and how do countries on the periphery of the global literary market challenge and enrich World Literature?

Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize

In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders.

This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eli馗er C疵denas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andr駸 Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alem疣's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.

Author: Luis A. Medina Cordova
ISBN-10: 1855663589
ISBN-13: 9781855663589
Publisher: Tamesis Books
Language: English
Published: 11/22/2022
Pages: 203
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.50d