Product Description

This work is Stavans's contribution to the literature on Columbus. "My purpose", says Stavans, "is to revisit, to investigate, to play with the asymmetrical geometries of the admiral's literary adventures in the human imagination". Arguing that writers have portrayed Columbus in three ways as prophet or messiah, as ambitious gold seeker, and as a conventional, rather unremarkable man Stavans examines numerous poems, novels, short stories, dramas, and other works on Columbus in this book. In Part 1, "Mapmaking", Stavans explores the two opposing views of the celebration of the quincentennial, and discusses the most notable biographies of Columbus, including those by Washington Irving and Samuel Eliot Morison. In Part 2, "Lives of a Literary Character", Stavans takes up the geographic and historical development of Columbus as a narrative figure in literature, and devotes a chapter to each of the three literary views of the admiral. Stavans includes portrayals of other writers' views on Columbus like Walt Whitman, Alejo Carpentier, James Fenimore Cooper, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikos Kazantzakis, Ruben Dario, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, among others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1873196 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
A strikingly original and extraordinarily informative account of Columbus's travels from the New World to the book world. Highly recommended. "Gustavo Perez Firmat"

About the Author
ILAN STAVANS is Professor of Spanish at Amherst College and the author/editor of over twenty books including The Hispanic Condition (sold over 30,000 copies, 7th printing) and Growing Up Latino (sold over 50,000 copies, 9th printing). In the next year, Stavans's upcoming books include On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (Viking 01) and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (02). The editor-in-chief of Hopscotch: A Cultural Review, Stavans has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Latino Literature Prize, and was nominated to the National Book Critics Circle Award.