In this comprehensive, up-to-the-minute survey of research and opinion by leading Latin American cultural and literary critics, Naomi Lindstrom examines five concepts that are currently the focus of intense debate among Latin American writers and thinkers. Writing in simple, clear terms for both general and specialist readers of Latin American literature, she explores the concepts of autonomy and dependency, postmodernism, literary intellectuals and the mass media, testimonial literature, and gender issues, including gay and lesbian themes. Excepts (in English) from relevant literary works illustrate each concept, while Lindstrom also traces its passage from the social sciences to literature.

In November 1979, Selma James spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Her subject was 'Ms Jane Austen', and she was enthusiastically received. Here is what she had to say, much expanded and enriched.

Text: English (translation) Original Language: French

"The author has constructed a chronicle of the life of Ilia Zdanevich (known as Iliazd), an important writer and artist in Russian and French modernism, and enriched this chronicle with commentary on the process of writing a biography and a discussion of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The author originally researched Iliazd with the help of his widow many years ago, and she revisited her notes taken at that time with an experienced scholar's critical distance"--

As a poet, critic, anthologist and teacher, Saskatchewan native Eli Mandel was a major figure in Canadian literature, particularly prairie literature. Mandel fashioned his identity as a post-Holocaust Jewish writer positioned dramatically between extremes of tradition and innovation, nation and region, East and West, producing work which can be read in a variety of contexts and which reflects patterns and changes within Canadian writing from the 1950s to the 1980s. This two-volume edition of Mandel's collected poetry includes the complete texts of ten previously published volumes of poetry, as well as 82 "new" poems never before presented in a collection.

Mandel's essays scrutinize the leap from modern to postmodern writing. Mandel also examines individual writers such as Gary Geddes, Leonard Cohen, P.K. Page, Frank Davey, Margaret Atwood and John Glassco."The quality of Mandel's criticism is uniformly high. He grinds no particular literary axe, speaks for no school but the school of intelligent inquiry."--Books in Canada