Problemas de género : narrativa policial y ciencia ficción en Puerto Rico, 1872-2014

Abstract

There is a new phenomenological trajectory in Puerto Rican crime narrative whose features link it to the earliest crime narratives, written when rules of genre literature had not yet been drawn. Genre literature, like literary genres, are forged amid the concerns and aspirations of their times. This analysis juxtaposes works by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826–82) and Pedro Cabiya (1971- ), writers of distinct historical moments in a national trajectory as inconclusive as it has been passionate. Taking literary genre as one of the most widely recognized expressions of a particular zeitgeist, the violation of the boundaries in these works points to the inherent instabilities of Puerto Rico’s collective Project.