At the nexus of politics and sexuality, Allegories of Transgression and Transformation examines how women's writing produced in the wake of authoritarian regimes in several South American countries simultaneously challenges both the effects of dictatorship and restrictive gender codes. The author examines the experimental fictions of four contemporary Latin American writers: Diamela Eltit of Chile, Nelida Pinon of Brazil, Reina Roffe of Argentina, and Cristina Peri Rossi of Uruguay. Tierney-Tello begins her study by exploring the particular relationships among authoritarian political oppression, restrictive gender codes, and the practice of writing. Then, through close readings that draw on feminist, psychoanalytic, and socio-political literary theories, she shows how each of the selected narratives illustrates different aspects of the effects of dictatorship, while also striving to develop new means of articulating gender and feminine sexuality. Throughout, Allegories of Transgression and Transformation suggests how the use of allegory allows these texts to question socio-political, genderic, and textual forms of authority and to trace an/other story.

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

The November 1970 coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power fundamentally transformed cultural production in Syria. A comprehensive intellectual, ideological, and political project—a Ba'thist cultural revolution—sought to align artistic endeavors with the ideological interests of the regime. The ensuing agonistic struggle pitted official aesthetics of power against alternative modes of creative expression that could evade or ignore the effects of the state. With this book, Max Weiss offers the first cultural and intellectual history of Ba'thist Syria, from the coming to power of Hafiz al-Asad, through the transitional period under Bashar al-Asad, and continuing up through the Syria War. Revolutions Aesthetic reconceptualizes contemporary Syrian politics, authoritarianism, and cultural life. Engaging rich original sources—novels, films, and cultural periodicals—Weiss highlights themes crucial to the making of contemporary Syria: heroism and leadership, gender and power, comedy and ideology, surveillance and the senses, witnessing and temporality, and death and the imagination. Revolutions Aesthetic places front and center the struggle around aesthetic ideology that has been key to the constitution of state, society, and culture in Syria over the course of the past fifty years.

Iranian filmmakers have long been recognised for creating a vibrant, aesthetically rich cinema whilst working under strict state censorship regulations. As Michelle Langford reveals, many have found indirect, allegorical ways of expressing forbidden topics and issues in their films. But for many, allegory is much more than a foil against haphazardly applied censorship rules. Drawing on a long history of allegorical expression in Persian poetry and the arts, allegory has become an integral part of the poetics of Iranian cinema. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explores the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema, explaining how it has emerged from deep cultural traditions and how it functions as a strategy for both supporting and resisting dominant ideology. As well as tracing the roots of allegory in Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 revolution, Langford also theorizes this cinematic mode. She draws on a range of cinematic, philosophical and cultural concepts - developed by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz and Vivian Sobchack - to provide a theoretical framework for detailed analyses of films by renowned directors of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras including Masoud Kimiai, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Asghar Farhadi. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explains how a centuries-old means of expression, interpretation, encoding and decoding becomes, in the hands of Iran's most skilled cineastes, a powerful tool with which to critique and challenge social and cultural norms.

Confronting Patriarchy: Psychoanalytic Theory in the Prose of Cristina Peri Rossi examines three works of the contemporary Uruguayan author who lives in exile as she dialogues with the psychoanalytic discourse endemic to patriarchal society. Peri Rossi's prose, structured like unconscious productions that give free expression to desire and passion as emanating from the forbidden recesses of the psyche, powerfully reveals the message as a treatment for an «ill» society. The language in the three works studied facilitates and reveals the male protagonist's interaction with the desired female object as a regression to a semiotic, pre-oedipal state in a type of «return of the repressed» of consuming desire that has been written out of mainstream patriarchy and that serves to challenge its rational, symbolic order. It is from this vantage point that the author attempts to re-write the conclusions obtained through Lacanian and patriarchal discourse so that woman can emerge as a subject in her own right.

In this timely study, Puga compares contemporary Southern Cone playwrights and their aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship; in the process, she traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory.

Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapple with transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea’s raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members of the sunken Sewol Ferry, as well as the political scandals of 2016, there has been much public debate about morality, transparency, and the law in South Korea. Yet, despite its prevalence in public discourse, transgression in Korea has not received proper scholarly attention. Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Chosŏn period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern literature, religion, and fi lm studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship.

An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot D az, H ctor Tobar, Cristina Garc a, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.