Kathleen Costello

The Composition of Culture: Popular Music and Social Identity in Contemporarynovels of the Hispanic Caribbean Kathleen Costello

Traditionally in Latin America the contrast betweenwritten and oral culture and between elite andpopular culture has been strongly marked. This bookconsiders theories regarding the elitist nature ofthe written word in Latin America, together withtheories of popular culture and the history ofCaribbean popular music, to examine how theliterature and the music inform each other, and howboth inform Caribbean social identity. The closereadings of the four novels included in this studyoffer insights on the particular social andhistorical moments dealt with in each text. Theanalysis should also help shed light on the recurringphenomenon of the use of popular music in HispanicCaribbean novels. It should prove useful to studentsand scholars of Latin American literature and culturein general, as well as to those more broadlyinterested in the connections between literature andpopular music and in the relationship between highand low culture in Latin America.