Steven Boldy – författare

Julio Cortázar is one of the best-known successful Latin American writers. His work has been widely translated and this 1980 book is a clear and detailed study of his four major novels. Steven Boldy recognises the complexity, the 'nerve centres of contradiction and tension' of Cortázar's novels, which resist a single dogmatic interpretation, but Dr Boldy's sympathetic analysis allows the reader to approach an understanding of the individual novels and the way these are linked by an underlying thematic pattern. Cortázar's work is seen in the context of its European and Argentinian background: the cultural materials of surrealism, allusiveness and eclecticism that he absorbs and transforms. The approach to the four major novels is not limited to one particular aspect or theme, but the dualism inherent in the writing and its philosophical and formal implications provide the basic framework for study.

This study examines the full range of Carlos Fuentes’ art, from the critical realism of his early novels to his highly experimental novels of the late sixties, and to his novels from the eighties where national identities are playfully evoked and largely dismantled through intertextual games, migrations of people and ideas

An introduction to one of Latin America's most important authors.Jorge Luis Borges is one of the key writers of the twentieth century in the context of both Hispanic and world literature. This Companion has been designed for keen readers of Borges whether they approach him in English orSpanish, within or outside a university context. It takes his stories and essays of the forties and fifties, especially Ficciones and El Aleph, to be his most significant works, and organizes its material in consequence. About two thirds of the book analyzes the stories of this period text by text. The early sections map Borges's intellectual trajectory up to the fifties in some detail, and up to his death more briefly. They aim to provide anaccount of the context which will allow the reader maximum access to the meaning and significance of his work and present a biographical narrative developed against the Argentine literary world in which Borges was a key player, the Argentine intellectual tradition in its historical context, and the Argentine and world politics to which his works respond in more or less obvious ways.STEVEN BOLDY is Reader in Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge.

A comprehensive study of the Mexican writer considered one of the finest novelists and short-story writers in 20th-century Latin America.Juan Rulfo, 1917-1986, is one of the three greatest writers of twentieth-century Mexico together with Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. A Companion to Juan Rulfo is the most comprehensive modern study of Rulfo. The first sections situate his life and work in the historical and political context of the Mexican Revolution and Cristero Wars and within the interlinking currents of specifically national and wider Western literary and cultural traditions.Later sections offer detailed analyses of the short stories, El Llano en llamas, the novel Pedro Páramo, the novella El gallo de oro and of Rulfo's substantial photographic work, the importance of which has only recently been grasped. Throughout the study the focus is to bring into a productive dialogue the different dimensions of Rulfo's texts: the materiality of his hauntingly strange poetic prose, the disturbing instability of meaning and identity, the alienation caused by violence and injustice.Steven Boldy is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge.