Jose Eduardo Gonzalez is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Borges and the Politics of Form and coeditor of Primitivism and Identity in Latin America: Essays on Art, Literature and Culture, and New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon.

A fascinating and innovative study of Angel Rama's silent and open dialogue with his intellectual interlocutors and the effects this dialogue had on Rama's notion of 'cultural modernization.' It follows Rama's evolution chronologically as a thinker who reflects on and writes about the impact of economics, politics, and society on literary matters in Latin America from colonial times to the late twentieth century.