ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book concerns primarily with such writers, the long-term residents over the past half-century, who spent most of their adult lives in Paris. The new writers who went in the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, were able to deepen the exchange with their European peers to the point that Latin American literature began to gain some respect in Paris. In the half-century since the war, the Latin American writers experience of Paris has altered and grown more complex. It was during the post-war period that Latin American literature fully achieved world status, in no small part by way of its reception in Paris. While the lure of Paris remained strong due to the tradition of previous generations who went there, as well as the continuing influence of French literature by the 1980s, this route of pilgrimage had lost its primacy.
