Novel Distortions

Novel Distortions analyzes recent (1996-2019) Mexican and Central American novels through aesthetic, economic, and political lenses to interrogate two interrelated crises: the decline of national modernity and the shifting role of the novel as a genre that shapes national identity, instructs citizens in proper conduct, and conveys ideology to the reading public. Considering works penned both domestically and in the diaspora, Mitchell proposes that a contemporary understanding of culture and society must account for the waning of the nation-state alongside burgeoning globalization as the dominant ordering system of world relations. Without romanticizing the nation-state, which has always been a fraught institution in Latin America, Mitchell recognizes the power and structural vacuum that has emerged as the epoch of national modernity recedes. As Mexico and Central America confront this new reality, this corpus lends imaginative definition to the state’s incapacity to respond to the challenges of neoliberalism and to guarantee the safety and security of its people. Mitchell explores how contemporary Mexican and Central American authors mobilize a neoliberal aesthetics to unsettle the category of national literature as a means of representing and responding to the emergence of a distinctly postnational epoch.