A common place

the long version

Paris, which has been called the literary capital of Spanish America, has had as great an impact on Hispanic literati as on their North American counterparts. A number of recent studies examine the role it has played in their lives and works. This book is the first full-length study to take up the relation between Spanish American literature and Paris. It focuses on the representation of the city in six novels published between 1963 and 1982, a period that corresponds with the coming of age of Spanish American fiction. It is also a point at which writers began to confront the problems that accompany the desire to represent a place that has become a commonplace in literature and art. The issues raised in this study are pertinent to contemporary fiction in general: important here are theories of representation, of place, of metafiction and parody, and questions involving postcolonial, urban, travel, and postmodern literature.