Colombia's forgotten frontier : a literary geography of the Putumayo
Lesley Wylie (Author)
"Coming to prominence during the tropical booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of mass immigration and exile, of subjugation and insurgency, and of violence. By way of a study of literature of and on the Putumayo by Latin American as well as US and European writers, Colombia's Forgotten Frontier explores the history and enduring significance of this Amazonian border zone, which has been visited both physically and imaginatively by figures such as Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and William Burroughs. Travel writing, testimony, diaries, letters, journalism, oral history, songs, photographs, and 'pulp' fiction are all considered alongside more conventional forms such as the novel. Whilst geographically peripheral, the Putumayo has played a central role in Colombia and beyond, both historically and, crucial to this study, culturally, producing a literature of extreme experience, marginality, and conflict"--Publisher's website
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 262 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
9781846319747, 1846319749
865655087
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
A note on translations
Introduction: Columbia's forgotten frontier
1. Geographies of violence: War reporting, 1990-2012
2. Green mansions to green hell: Travel writing, 1874-1907
3. No-man's land: Testimonial literature of the rubber boom
4. 'Exotic strangers': the native body in text and image, 1911 and 1969
5. Frontier fictions: 'la novela de la selva', 1924 and 1933
6. The front line: War writing, 1933
7. 'Fragments of things': the aesthetics of 'yagé'
8. Oil and blood: Pulp fiction of the twenty-first century
In English; occasional phrases in Spanish with English translations