The Avant-Garde after Bolaño

The Avant-Garde after Bolaño: Literature and Affects in Latin America studies how the paradigmatic impact of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño has reshaped and revitalized the idea of the avant-garde in Latin America. Not only did the publication of his novel Los detectives salvajes in 1998 achieve a global success that Latin American literature had not seen since the so-called Boom of the 1960s and figures such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Bolaño also introduced his readers to a fictionalized avant-garde group, Visceral Realism, which has become iconic enough to serve as a model for a younger generation of authors who emerged on the international scene in the 21st century. Adopting a Bolañesque lens to examine novels centred on the daily lives of groups of artists, by authors ranging from Julio Cortázar and Roque Dalton to Mónica Ojeda and Alejandro Zambra, The Avant-Garde after Bolaño shows that both precursors and continuators of Bolaño have depicted the creation of communities and affects, rather than artworks or manifestos, as the specific way avant-gardes contribute to driving social change.