A Twice-Told Tale: Reinventing the Encounter in Iberian/Iberian American Literature and Film

A Twice-Told Tale analyzes contemporary reconstructions of the age of "discovery," exploration, and conquest vis-à-vis fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources (histories, chronicles, and relaciones). The essays included, all of which appear here for the first time, focus on two clearly defined areas of study: colonial issues, and twentieth-century literature and film. Some of the articles concentrate on texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; thus the documentation utilized belongs to the Latin American foundational period. Others direct the reader's attention to twentieth-century retrospective views of that period; in these cases, the object of analysis focuses primarily on the discursive practices of our time. Such a recurrent oscillation between colonial past and postcolonial present constitutes the essence of the book. The editors' goal has been precisely to explore the double interpretation (the "twice-told tale") of a key period in the configuration of Latin American identity.