Conventional literary histories of Latin America generally regard the “realist” novel as a creation of nineteenth-century Europe, exported to a Latin America that then simply reproduced it with some added local content. To escape concluding, perversely, that it had therefore already ceased to exist roughly a century ago, a contemporary history freed of such neocolonial ideology necessitates a theory of the Latin American realist novel as form. Fortunately, we can turn to the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz for such a theory. Deploying Schwarz’s mediational concept of an objective form that is simultaneously literary and socio-historical, this chapter proposes a differential typology of realism based on Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Attributing realism to 2666 is, admittedly, more contentious than in the case of Mayta and Vargas Llosa’s more classically realist collective opus. But such a typology nevertheless reveals how the form of the novel itself may have shifted in relation to the reality of the nation and of national-popular collective life in Latin America: While, in Mayta, national-historical experience and realism remain organically linked to one another, the more problematic realism of 2666 appears, if anything, to have ruptured this bond.

The novel is a global form, both in its origins and in its reach, and realism remains one of its key modes of engaging with the world. This introduction, then, sets out the basic goals of our volume: to track the novel as it engages with new cultures and nations, to understand the ways in which its travels are tied, but not reducible, to global capital, and to see how the novel form is consistently altered by the new social worlds it encounters. Building on both Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz, I argue that the realist novel provides a set of resources that authors work with and against as they depict the worlds in which they live.

This essay offers a three-part periodization of the Latin American novel in dialogue with 1960s dependency theory, arguably Latin America’s most important contribution to a wider Marxist tradition. Against the backdrop of a widespread turn toward textualist modes of analysis in the field of literary studies since the 1980s, this essay argues that dependency theory and the novel offer parallel means through which to analyze the structured nature of Latin American “difference” as arising from within – and not outside or beyond – the order of capital. Moving from nineteenth-century Brazilian realism to 1960s “Boom” narrative to contemporary Mexican noir, and drawing from pioneering critics such as Roberto Schwarz, Jean Franco, and Hernán Vidal, the essay argues that both dependency theory and the novel remain vital to excavating a history of the present.

Chapter 1 advances a redefinition of world literature with specific focus on the periphery. Annotating a politically charged terrain of intellectual history, I maintain that the humanist imagination emerged as a key topic of debates since the early twentieth century, and second, that anti-imperial currents emphasized the role of the imagination in envisioning an alternative conception of the world. As part of this internationalist constellation, the chapter discusses the intertwining histories of Rabindranath Tagore’s pioneering lecture on “World Literature” ‘1907’ and Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on art and literature ‘1942’. Such a constellation sheds new light on Fredric Jameson’s much-debated notion of “third world literature as national allegory” ‘1986’, going beyond extant critiques. It further complicates, I argue, the conventional separation between twentieth century anticolonial, postcolonial, and contemporary globalization-era literatures.