Francine Masiello – författare

One of the most dramatic figures among Latin America's romantic writers and the distinguished woman writer of her century, Juana Manuela Gorriti brings passion and intrigue to the scene of writing. An exile from her native Argentina who sought refuge first in Bolivia and then in Peru, her lifetime of travel and displacement is echoed in her fictions. Her short stories tell of homelessness and nomadic yearnings, taking the reader from the Peruvian highlands, where Spanish colonizers plot to rob the treasures of the Incas, to the Argentine capital city plagued by sinister political intentions. Her later fictions move from Chile to scenes of the California Gold Rush.Covering the wide landscape of the Americas, Gorriti tracks the spirit of nineteenth-century adventurers and dandies, nation builders and soldiers who participate in the conflicts of settlement in a new and lawless land. Women are the protagonists here, mediating episodes of civil strife as they voice their despair about the treachery of fortune seekers in Latin America in the years following Independence from Spain.Dreams and Realities offers a sampling of Gorriti's stories, showing the range of her commitment to political fiction drawn in the romantic style. Originally published in four volumes under the titles Suenos y realidades and Panoramas de la vida, her works deal with the tyranny of the Rosas regime, the mediating role of women, and the clash of European and indigenous cultures. Notwithstanding her personal political leanings, Gorriti's stories and fictions provide a generous dose of swashbuckling adventure and romance. Translated into English for the first time by Sergio Weisman and with an Introduction, Chronology, and Critical Notes by Francine Maisello, the book gives a woman's view of the world of political intrigue and civil unrest that marks Latin America's turbulent nineteenth century.

The Art of Transition addresses the problems defined by writers and artists during the postdictatorship years in Argentina and Chile, years in which both countries aggressively adopted neoliberal market-driven economies. Delving into the conflicting efforts of intellectuals to name and speak to what is real, Francine Masiello interprets the culture of this period as an art of transition, referring to both the political transition to democracy and the formal strategies of wrestling with this change that are found in the aesthetic realm.Masiello views representation as both a political and artistic device, concerned with the tensions between truth and lies, experience and language, and intellectuals and the marginal subjects they study and claim to defend. These often contentious negotiations, she argues, are most provocatively displayed through the spectacle of difference, which constantly crosses the literary stage, the market, and the North/South divide. While forcefully defending the ability of literature and art to advance ethical positions and to foster a critical view of neoliberalism, Masiello especially shows how issues of gender and sexuality function as integrating threads throughout this cultural project. Through discussions of visual art as well as literary work by prominent novelists and poets, Masiello sketches a broad landscape of vivid intellectual debate in the Southern Cone of Latin America.The Art of Transition will interest Latin Americanists,literary and political theorists, art critics and historians, and those involved with the study of postmodernism and globalization.