A Common Place

Paris, which has been called the literary capital of Spanish America, has had as great an impact on Hispanic literati as on their North American counterparts. A number of recent studies examine the role it has played in their lives and works. This book is the first full-length study to take up the relation between Spanish American literature and Paris.

It focuses on the representation of the city in six novels published between 1963 and 1982, a period that corresponds with the coming of age of Spanish American fiction. It is also a point at which writers began to confront the problems that accompany the desire to represent a place that has become a commonplace in literature and art.

The issues raised in this study are pertinent to contemporary fiction in general: important here are theories of representation, of place, of metafiction and parody, and questions involving postcolonial, urban, travel, and postmodern literature.