Top 10 Books About Mexican Literature

1. Mexican Literature: A History

by David William Foster. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "Mexico has a rich literary heritage that extends back over centuries to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. This major new reference work surveys more than five hundred years of Mexican literature from a sociocultural perspective. More than merely a catalog of names and titles, it examines in detail the literary phenomena that constitute Mexico's most significant and original contributions to literature."

2. LA Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth

by Sandra Messinger Cypess. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "Of all the historical characters known from the time of the Spanish conquest of the New World, none has proved more pervasive or controversial than that of the Indian interpreter, guide, mistress, and confidante of Hernan Cortes, Dona Marina--La Malinche--Malintzin. An Amerindian woman who was given as a gift to Cortes, she bore him a son whose birth symbolized the intermingling of races..."

3. Mexican Literature: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources

by David William Foster. Rowman & Littlefield. From the publisher: "This revised edition provides a registry of criticism on seventy-eight writers of Mexico in all genres and periods. Foster updates coverage on the fifty authors included in the original 1981 edition, but over half of the listings represent additional authors. Coverage includes monographs and critical articles in academic, intellectual, and literary-cultural journals in Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and Europe."

4. Dictionary of Mexican Literature

by Eladio Cortes (Editor). Greenwood Publishing Group. From the publisher: "Approximately 600 entries represent the major writers, literary schools, and cultural movements in the history of Mexican literature. The volume features bibliographical, biographical, and critical material, placing each work in its cultural and historical framework."

5. Shattered Mirror: Representations of Women in Mexican Literature

by Maria Elena Elena de Valdes. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "This book explores this major change in the literary representation of women in Mexico. Maria Elena de Valdes enters into a selective examination of literary representation in its social context and a contestatory engagement of both the literary text and its place in the social reality of Mexico."

6. Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750

by Elisa Sampson Vera Sampson Tudela. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "Drawing on previously unpublished writings by and about nuns in the convents of Mexico City, she investigates such topics as the relationship between hagiography and travel narratives, male visions of the feminine that emerge from the reworking of a nun's letters to her confessor into a hagiography, the discourse surrounding a convent's trial for heresy by the Inquisition, and the reports of Spanish priests..."

7. The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity

by John A. Ochoa. University of Texas Press. John A. Ochoa writes: "Each of the texts in this study is reconsidered within the context of these historical 'pillars of our being.' The subject of the first chapter, Bernal Díaz's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568, 1632), is not only the best-known account of the Conquest but also the foundational epic of both Mexico and Latin America."

8. The Fragmented Novel in Mexico

by Carol Clark D'Lugo. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "In this innovative study, Carol Clark D'Lugo examines fragmentation as a literary strategy that reflects the social and political fissures within modern Mexican society and introduces readers to a more participatory reading of texts."

9. Aztec and Maya Myths

by Karl Taube. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "Drawing on these sources as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century excavations and research, including the interpretation of the codices and the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, the author discusses, among other things, the Popol Vuh myths of the Maya, the flood myth of Northern Yucatan, and the Aztec creation myths."

10. Narratives of Greater Mexico

by Héctor Calderón. University of Texas Press. From the publisher: "In this pioneering study, Héctor Calderón looks at seven Chicana and Chicano writers whose narratives constitute what he terms an American Mexican literature. Drawing on the concept of "Greater Mexican" culture first articulated by Américo Paredes, Calderón explores how the works of Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya... and Sandra Cisneros derive from Mexican literary traditions and genres that reach all the way back to the colonial era."