Representations of Violence and Peace in Contemporary Central American Narrative

To speak about a symbiotic relationship between literature and violence in Hispanic American narratives has become a generalized criterion, almost a commonplace, in literary and cultural studies. In his essay La violencia en la novela hispanoamericana actual published more than 50 years ago, Ariel Dorfman in the first lines hyperbolically asserted that the preoccupation with violence “can be seen in every page written in our continent” (Dorfman 1972, 9). This judgment has served as the leitmotiv of countless studies on the problematic published since this foundational essay, which have referred to the Chilean writer’s dissertations both affirmatively and critically. ¹