Novel Distortions - (Illuminations) by Tamara Mitchell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The novel emerged in lockstep with the nation-state, serving as the cultural counterpart to political form in the modern era. However, these dynamics are unraveling as the raison d'être of the contemporary state veers from its people to the neoliberal market. In Novel Distortions, Tamara L. Mitchell analyzes recent (1996-2019) Mexican and Central American fiction and theorizes this emergent epoch through the lens of postnationalism, which describes the altered but still active role of the patriarchal nation-state in society and culture, as well as the way in which novelistic form inscribes and is a symptom of these changes. Within this context, Mitchell examines narrative fiction that mobilizes a postnational aesthetics to illuminate the distortionary effects of neoliberalism and state violence on modern literary and political forms. As Mexico and Central America confront this new reality, this corpus dramatizes the state's incapacity to guarantee the security of its people and territory. At the same time, the works' postnational aesthetics lend imaginative definition to forms of relationality, care, and storytelling that defy the individuality and exclusion fomented by emergent neoliberal logic.

Review Quotes

Novel Distortions is a theoretically sophisticated book about literary form, and a groundbreaking approach to the ways in which the novel has morphed during the neoliberal era. Tamara L. Mitchell, one of the finest scholars in the field, offers a masterful study of the relationship between the literary and the political sure to become a model for critics across fields.--Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature

Novel Distortions issues a clarion call to scholars of Mexican and Central American literature to stop siloing these regions in our analyses. Through a series of incisive close readings, Tamara Mitchell unpacks how authors from across Mesoamerica mobilize a postnational aesthetic attuned to the neoliberal reorganization of life, labor, and community.--Carolyn Fornoff, Cornell University

About the Author

Tamara Mitchell is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of British Columbia.