Glen S. Close – författare

The image of the hard-boiled private investigator from gritty pulp fiction, a terse and mysterious figure, has become increasingly universal as the detective novel crosses more and more borders. A booming genre in Latin America, Spain and other Hispanic cultures, detective fiction has transcended the limitations of its influences. Hispanic authors relatively new to the genre have published novels and series popular with the public, while a number of well-known writers have adapted the genre to reflect the concurrent globalization of modern society and the crimes within it.This volume presents a compilation of 11 critical essays on genero negro--contemporary detective fiction in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian canon. Surveying the last twenty years, the text analyzes emerging trends in this rapidly evolving genre, as well as the mutations and innovations taking place within the style. The first section of the book is dedicated to the detective fiction of Spain and Portugal. The second section surveys works from Latin America and the United States, where topics touch on universal subjects like crime, identity and feminism.

Corpse Encounters in Spanish and Latin American Narrative Fiction: Tantos muertos takes a historically and geographically broad view to argue for the central significance of corpses in modern and contemporary Spanish and Latin American narrative fiction.It offers critical readings of twenty novels and short stories from nine countries to show how modern and contemporary prose fiction addresses the human death crisis triggered by corpse encounters. It demonstrates that literary corpse encounters register histories of social violence that include both political repression and a current epidemic of organized criminality in Latin America. The corpse is shown to function in four primary ways: as an index of historical violence, as a figure of a social body rent by dissolutive forces, as a metaliterary figure of the narrative text itself, and as evidence of a necroecological sensibility shaped by post-Christian and posthumanist views of death.The book traces the rise of this necroecological sensibility and proposes that the autopsied corpse emerges as a prominent figure for the literary text itself, as authors liken writing and narration to post-autopsic stitching. Authors studied include Pío Baroja, Rafael Chirbes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig and Cristina Rivera Garza.

This book examines the central significance of sexualized female corpses in modern and contemporary Hispanic and Anglophone crime fiction.