Viajes, exilio y migraciones: representaciones en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XXI

As much as the travel narratives go back to The Odyssey, or to the mythical exile of the founding couple of humanity, expelled from the Garden of Eden, the truth is that studies about the traveling writer, in contrast to their sibling painters, are relatively recent. Although in the beginning of the 20th Century, Victor Sklovsky had said, bluntly, that “travel books are on the shelves next to fiction”, assuming that the genre had its origin in the ancient voyage. The persistence of the motive of mobility–represented in universal literature from the transcription of mythologies, be they Maya, Aztec, Greco-Roman, or Celtic, to the great adventure novels of the 19th Century, or the chronicles of exile in the 20th Century –especially in this last half century is explained by the proliferation of displacements as a visible feature of globalization.