Jean Franco (1924-2022) was Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She was the winner of the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, and has been recognized by both the Chilean and Venezuelan governments with the Gabriela Mistral Medal and the Andres Bello Medal for advancing literary scholarship on Latin American literature in the United States. Her previous books include Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, CÉsar Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence, and A Literary History of Spain and Spanish.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: The Committed Critic / Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman 11 Feminism and the Critique of Authoritarianism 92 Mass and Popular Culture 1333 Latin American Literature: The Boom and Beyond 2334 Mexico 429Afterword: The Twighlight of the Vanguard and the Rise of Criticism (1994-1995) 503Biographical Note 517Index 519

“A formidable compendium of Franco’s critical thought, attesting to the evolution of a brilliant avant-garde intellectual who has set the pace for serious inquiry in the Latin American field as we know it today. Critical Passions is not simply a tribute to Franco but an urgent recounting of the progression of a field of study that she has helped shape.”-Francine Masiello, author of Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina “Pratt and Newman have done the critical readership an immense service by collecting these far-flung essays by one of our foremost critics. This learned feminist touches upon issues of history and identity, of cultural politics and the study of globality, from a political perspective that remains resolutely focused on social justice.”-Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present “The essays collected in this volume reflect the range, innovativeness, theoretical clarity, and analytical power that have made Jean Franco’s work a beacon of light in the study of Latin American culture.”-Susan Kirkpatrick, author of Las Romanticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain