Guatemalan Literature - Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century

In the 20th century, Guatemalan literature reached a level comparable to that of other Latin American countries. The most important Guatemalan writers in this period are novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967 Nobel Prize winner and author of novels including El Señor Presidente and Hombres de Maíz), poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón, short story writer and novelist Augusto Monterroso (2000 Príncipe de Asturias prize winner), and playwright Carlos Solórzano. In general, 20th-century Guatemalan literature is strongly influenced by politics, as evidenced by the fact that its authors were forced into exile during Guatemala's successive dictatorships and civil wars.

20th-century Guatemalan literature is usually divided by generation or decade:

  • The generation of 1910 or "the Comet"
  • The generation of 1920
  • The generation of 1930 or "Grupo Tepeus"
  • The generation of 1940 or "Grupo Acento"]
  • The Grupo Saker-ti (1944–1954)
  • The generation "comprometida" (after 1954)
North American literature
Sovereign states
  • Antigua and Barbuda
  • Bahamas
  • Barbados
  • Belize
  • Canada
  • Costa Rica
  • Cuba
  • Dominica
  • Dominican Republic
  • El Salvador
  • Grenada
  • Guatemala
  • Haiti
  • Honduras
  • Jamaica
  • Mexico
  • Nicaragua
  • Panama
  • Saint Kitts and Nevis
  • Saint Lucia
  • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
  • Trinidad and Tobago
  • United States
Dependencies and
other territories
  • Anguilla
  • Aruba
  • Bermuda
  • Bonaire
  • British Virgin Islands
  • Cayman Islands
  • Curaçao
  • Greenland
  • Guadeloupe
  • Martinique
  • Montserrat
  • Puerto Rico
  • Saint Barthélemy
  • Saint Martin
  • Saint Pierre and Miquelon
  • Saba
  • Sint Eustatius
  • Sint Maarten
  • Turks and Caicos Islands
  • United States Virgin Islands

Read more about this topic:  Guatemalan Literature

Famous quotes related to twentieth century:

    “A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious ‘retreat’ of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
    —Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    “In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
    —E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)

    “War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
    —Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)

    “Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”
    —Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)