This study explores the social functions of literature from the perspective of policymakers, writers, readers and residents in contemporary Cuba. It provides a new perspective on post-59 Cuban literature that underlines how cultural policy has made literature a hybrid activity between elite and mass culture, with inherent social, rather than aesthetic or political, value. Whilst many traditional studies of Cuban literature assume either its subjugation to politics and ideology or, converse...

The 1970s have largely been overlooked in scholarly studies of the Cuban Revolution, or, at the very least, dismissed simply as a period of “Sovietization” characterized by widespread bureaucratization, institutionalization, and adherence to Soviet orthodoxy. Consequently, scant research exists that examines the major changes that took place across the decade and their role in determining the course of the Revolution. This book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of th...

Latin American Literature in Transition 1930-1980 explores the literary landscape of the mid-twentieth-century and the texts that were produced during that period. It takes four core areas of thematic and conceptual focus – solidarity, aesthetics and innovation, war, revolution and dictatorship, metropolis and ruins – and employs them to explore the complexity, heterogeneity and hybridity of form, genre, subject matter and discipline that characterised literature from the period. In doing ...