Revisiting Nineteenth-century Romances and Eroticism in Latin America and Spain (56th NeMLA Convention (2025))
Philadelphia
Organization: NeMLA
Event: 56th NeMLA Convention (2025)
Romantic novels, along with narratives of sexuality and desire, usually have a Moebius-like continuity with politics. Inquiring about 19th-century Latin American national romances, more than three decades ago, Doris Sommer asked: “What better way to argue the polemic for civilization than to make desire the relentless motivation for a literary/political project?” (27) In her influential book, Foundational Fictions. The National Romances of Latin America (1991), she presented a reading of Latin American romances as allegories, showing the centrality of this literary genre not sufficiently considered in literary criticism to understand how nations and states consolidated and overcame political fragmentation. While the felicitousness of the concept of allegory to approach romances has been discussed and challenged (as, for example, in Gustavo Faverón Patriau’s 2011 book, Contra la alegoría. Hegemonía y disidencia en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XIX), it remains open for discussion along with the erotic-political impressions of romance novels.
This panel proposes revisiting Latin American and Spanish 19th-century novels and their uses of romance, desire, and erotism. We aim to bring up the archive of romance novels to date in two ways: by renewing the critical lens from which they have been approached (i.e. critical race and ethnicity studies, gender and sexuality, feminist, and queer studies, psychoanalysis, animal studies, etc.), and by studying their influence in 21st-century literature. How do we interrogate, as literary critics, their role in past political dynamics from our present analytic frameworks? Furthermore, how have these novels continued to stimulate contemporary literature amidst global nationalistic and conservative proliferation?
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21125
Maria Laura Martinelli