"Lucid and learned... much more than an exercise in retrieval, although it is splendid on this account alone, Bell-Villada has also joined debates about the Latin American novel, deconstructionism, and post-modernism, offering what is always in short supply: a wide-angled, historical, and penetrating perspective."- Russell Jacoby. "Professor Bell-Villada has rendered an incomparable service to those probing the sources of the modern aesthetic ... I have found his book so wide-ranging and...