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9781611487671

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A wonderful achievement, and a very welcome addition to the body of scholarship on the life and work of Horacio Quiroga, a writer of great relevance in our time of ecological crisis. Todd Garth tackles some of the most puzzling questions for readers of Quiroga-his ambivalent relationship to science and technology, the tension between his fascination with the menacing aspects of tropical nature and his commitment to what is today known as environmental sustainability, and, especially, his apparent misogyny. Garth reads the canonical stories in tandem with Quiroga's lesser-known fiction, his letters, film criticism, and copious writings for children so as to skillfully and convincingly unpack Quiroga's radical critique of the social and sexual mores of the urban bourgeoisie. -- Jennifer L. French, Williams College Master of a long tradition of the short story in Latin America, Quiroga's life, works and influence are widely known in the Spanish-speaking world. Violence, tragedy and testing nature's limits are central to Quiroga's life and fiction as he moved between the heightened rhythms of urban modernization and immigration, and the untamed, dangerous nature of tropical wilderness. Quiroga asks, What is a man and what is human? as he pushes against all limits. Garth seizes on this tension, and confronts the life/fiction dynamic, writing clearly and convincingly about Quiroga's worlds of society, commerce, nature, and human striving. To write now about Quiroga requires talent and new research. Garth gives us both, with passion. -- Gwen Kirkpatrick, Georgetown University The work of those writers most difficult to situate in their context can be the most illuminating about competing, unresolved cultural or intellectual forces of their time. Immersing us in the full-bodied paradoxes of an extensive, multifaceted oeuvre, Todd Garth masterfully teases out these revelations in the writing of Horacio Quiroga. Central to Garth's reading is his analysis of a tense dynamic between the heroic and the monstrous in Quiroga's conception of the early twentieth-century self of the River Plate region, beset by disorienting modernization, expansive bourgeois culture, immigration, and social change. While emphasizing that Quiroga resisted the explicitly ideological, Garth uses the writer's conceptual dynamic of the heroic and monstrous to unpack his writing as fertile terrain for critical reflection on shifting social relationships marked by hierarchies of class, cultural origin, or gender and on the impact of modern film, science, technology, and pedagogy on the fraught ethical formation of the modern individual. Essential reading for both specialists and students of Quiroga or his era, Garth's far-reaching, engaging study offers remarkable critical rigor and documentation; an adroit synthesis of pertinent theoretical sources from Quiroga's time to the present; and revelatory, context-sensitive readings of both time-honored Quiroga classics and his less-studied work. -- Vicky Unruh, professor emerita, University of Kansas

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Todd S. Garth is professor of Spanish in the Languages and Cultures Department at the United States Naval Academy.

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