Between London and Lima: Latin America, the anglophone world, and twentieth-century and contemporary fiction

This dissertation explores the relationship between Latin American settings and the Anglophone world in the twentieth-century and contemporary novels of Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, arguing for a reconsideration of both Anglophone and Hispanophone literary histories and traditions. By tracing representations of Britain’s vast informal empire in the Americas following the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, I imagine the existence of an Anglo-Latin American cultural and political sphere whose structure is rendered legible in the thematic and formal connections formed within and across the texts of this dissertation. Beginning in the fictional Latin American republic of Costaguana in Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), this project examines the respective Mexican, Cuban, and Panamanian settings of Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (1926), Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), and Vásquez’ The Secret History of Costaguana (2007), which lie firmly within the boundaries of multiple competing and overlapping imperial systems, including the Spanish, British, and U.S. empires. These novels produce and are produced by the relations of informal empire that emerge from and give shape to the space of Anglo-Latin America.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference