Inter-American Literature involves the comparative study of authors and texts from all the Americas: North, South and Central, including the Caribbean. This all-inclusive scope—Canada, the United States, Spanish America

Ibero-America

Ibero-America is a term used since the second half of the 19th century to refer collectively to the countries in the Americas that were formerly colonies of Spain or Portugal. Spain and Portugal are themselves included in some definitions, such as that of the Ibero-American Summit and the...

, Brazil, smaller Anglophone and Francophone countries, and Native America—covers the principal languages of the extreme Western Hemisphere—English, Spanish, Portuguese, French—as well as, in some cases, indigenous languages.

The method can have a broad focus, as in studies of race relations in the Americas or the literary representation of the Native American, or it can focus more narrowly on issues of influence and reception that link specific authors and texts. For example, certain novels by Brazil’s Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis , often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho , was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature, but he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in...

 influenced John Barth’s The Floating Opera, and Faulkner influenced a number of writers from Spanish America, including Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...

 and Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...

.

Inter-American Literature can also deal with the development of certain literary forms, such as the immigrant novel or the New-World epic poem

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

, or with literary periods and movements, such as the colonial period, the nineteenth-century, or Modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 in the Americas.

Ideally, every Inter-American Literature project should involve at least two of the New World’s languages and literatures, as, for instance, in a study of the “New Novel” form in Canada, the United States, Peru, and Brazil during the 1960s.

As in comparative studies

Comparison

Comparison may refer to:-Language:* Comparison , a feature of many languages* Degree of comparison, an English language grammatical feature* Mass comparison, a test for the relatedness of languages-Mathematics:...

 generally, inter-American literary scholarship should work, as often as possible, with texts written in their original languages and should seek to identify those similarities (of theme, form, or period) that tie the literatures of the Americas together while also recognizing and maintaining the very important differences (of history, style, and culture) that distinguish them and that make them separate works of art.

At present, Inter-American Literature is mostly dominated by U.S. scholars. The fact that the U.S. has become the prime locus of production of Inter-American studies poses several problems, the most important of which is that the field betrays its own raison-d'etre. The field cannot be truly inter-American when most American countries are relegated to the position of object of study.

Sources

Earl E. Fitz. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context. Iowa U P, 1991.

Elizabeth Lowe and Earl E. Fitz. Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature, U P of Florida, 2008.

Nina Scott. Inter-American Literature: An Antidote to the Arrogance of Culture. College English. 2004.

Monika Kaup, Debra J. Rosenthal, eds. Mixing race, mixing culture. U Texas P, 2002.

Earl E. Fitz. Spanish American and Brazilian Literature in Inter-American Perspective: The Comparative Approach. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

and Culture 4.2 (2002).