Cuba and the Tempest: Literature and Cinema in the Time of Diaspora

By Eduardo González

Book Overview

In a unique analysis of Cuban literature inside and outside the country's borders, Eduardo Gonz lez looks closely at the work of three of the most important contemporary Cuban authors to write in the post-1959 diaspora: Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005), who left Cuba for good in 1965 and established himself in London; Antonio Ben tez-Rojo (1931-2005), who settled in the United States; and Leonardo Padura Fuentes (b. 1955), who still lives and writes in Cuba.

Through the positive experiences of exile and wandering that appear in their work, these three writers exhibit what Gonz lez calls "Romantic authorship," a deep connection to the Romantic spirit of irony and complex sublimity crafted in literature by Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In Gonz lez's view, a writer becomes a belated Romantic by dint of exile adopted creatively with comic or tragic irony. Gonz lez weaves into his analysis related cinematic elements of myth, folktale, and the grotesque that appear in the work of filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Pedro Almod var. Placing the three Cuban writers in conversation with artists and thinkers from British and American literature, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cinema, Gonz lez ultimately provides a space in which Cuba and its literature, inside and outside its borders, are deprovincialized.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807856835
• ISBN13: 9780807856833
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"