Elective Affinities

Book excerpt: From the nineteenth century to the present, literary entanglements between Latin America and East Central Europe have been socio-politically and culturally diverse, but never random. The Iron Curtain, in particular, forced both regions to negotiate transatlantic «elective affinities», to take a stance in relation to the West, and to position themselves within world literature. As a result, the intellectual fields and creative productions of these regions have critically engaged with notions such as «post-imperial», «marginal», or «peripheral». In this edited volume, scholars from Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain cross the globe from South to East and back to uncover transcultural and transareal convivialities. Their papers explore literary history, poetics, intellectual networks, and aesthetic theory, while discussing new key concepts in global literary history.