Corpse Encounters in Spanish and Latin American Narrative Fiction

Corpse Encounters in Spanish and Latin American Narrative Fiction: Tantos muertos takes a historically and geographically broad view to argue for the central significance of corpses in modern and contemporary Spanish and Latin American narrative fiction.

It offers critical readings of 20 novels and short stories from nine countries to show how modern and contemporary prose fiction addresses the human death crisis triggered by corpse encounters. It demonstrates that literary corpse encounters register histories of social violence that include both political repression and the current epidemic of organized criminality in Latin America. The corpse is shown to function in four primary ways: as an index of historical violence, as a figure of a social body rent by dissolutive forces, as a metaliterary figure of the narrative text itself, and as evidence of a necroecological sensibility shaped by post-Christian and posthumanist views of death.

The book traces the rise of this necroecological sensibility and proposes that the autopsied corpse emerges as a prominent figure for the literary text itself, as authors liken writing and narration to post-autopsy stitching. Authors studied include Pío Baroja, Rafael Chirbes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig and Cristina Rivera Garza.