6 - Late Twentieth-Century Literature

Summary

Alan Sinfield has described effectively the change which occurred in the literary field in the 1960s.

Literature since the 1960s has […] looked increasingly like a commodity (with, for instance, a top ten like pop records). Books may be conceived not by authors, but by publishers who commission a work they believe they can sell. […] The idea of literary quality is used as a manifest marketing ploy – in literary prizes such as the Booker (with the final announcement live on television), in the promotion of book clubs, and in the selling of films and television serials through their derivation from a literary classic – and then the book through its connections with the screen version. (Sinfield 291)

A similar type of commodification of literature began to emerge in Latin America. As Fernández Retamar recalls of the early 1970s: ‘Grants proliferated, colloquiums flourished, chairs to study and dissect us sprouted like toadstools after a rainstorm. There was even talk, in the most wretched stock-market taste, of the Boom of the Latin American novel’ (Caliban Revisited 48). These were new times in which Latin American writers, in direct contradistinction to a previous era, could gain substantial royalties for their work, win highly lucrative literary prizes and be lionised by the world press. The Boom – centring on writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa – signalled the definitive birth of Spanish American literature, thrusting it to the centre of the world's literary stage (see, in particular, ‘The Boom Novel’, pp. 205–12 below).

The picture of the publishing industry in Brazil during this period is similar. By 1980, the Brazilian book market had grown by a ratio of almost 100, compared to its sales in 1917 (Hallewell 571). A number of factors had given rise to this expansion: the Globo booksellers, under the inspired leadership of Érico Verissimo, began to publish high-quality translations of foreign classics in the 1940s and 1950s (402);