Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes is a master of modern world literature. With the translation of his major works into English and other languages, his reputation has surpassed the boundaries of his native Mexico and of Hispanic literature and has become international. Now each new novel stimulates popular and scholarly reviews in periodicals from Mexico City and Buenos Aires to Paris and New York. Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View is the first full-scale examination in English of this major writer’s work. The range and diversity of this critical view are remarkable and reflect similar characteristics in the creative work of Carlos Fuentes, a man of formidable intellectual energy and curiosity. The whole of Fuentes’ work is encompassed by Luis Leal as he explores history and myth in the writer’s narrative. Insightful new views of single works are provided by other well-known scholars, such as Roberto González Echevarría, writing on Fuentes’ extraordinary Terra Nostra, and Margaret Sayers Peden, exploring Distant Relations, for which she served as authorized translator. Here too are fresh approaches to Fuentes’ other novels, among them Where the Air Is Clear, Aura, and The Hydra Head, as well as an examination by John Brushwood of the writer’s short fiction and a look by Merlin Forster at Fuentes the playwright. Lanin Gyurko reaches outside Fuentes’ canon for his fascinating study of the influence of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane on The Death of Artemio Cruz. Manuel Durán and George Wing consider Fuentes in his role as critic of both literature and art. Carlos Fuentes: A Critical View has been prepared with the writer’s many English-speaking readers in mind. Quotations are most frequently from standard, readily available English translations of Fuentes’ works. A valuable chronology of the writer’s life rounds off the volume.

Robert Brody is Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese, and Charles Rossman is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin.