In the opening segment of Der Waldgänger (The Forest-Goer, 1846), one of his few stories that Stifter did not revise and reissue in book format, the autofictional narrator reminisces on his definitive departure from his Bohemian homeland. Somewhere near Kirchschlag in the foothills above Linz, “der Verfasser” or “der Wanderer” (the author/the wanderer), as Stifter alternately refers to himself in the third person, crosses a divide separating the Mühlkreis region from the Danube basin of Upper Austria. In the process, he surveys numerous natural features on either side of the ridgeline, including those pertaining to the geosphere (mountains, rolling hills, vales), the hydrosphere (rivers, streams, rivulets), the biosphere (forests, bushes, orchards), and the atmosphere (the meteorological differences between the overcast skies to the north and the sunny climes to the south). Whereas the distant dark-blue strip of the Bohemian Forest blends with the gray ceiling of clouds behind him, the sunlit river basin below seems to beckon toward a new and figuratively bright future. This pivotal point of his journey from Bohemia to Vienna, where he will spend the next twenty-two years of his life, significantly occurs upon a point of partition or Scheidepunkt in the physical landscape. Indeed, this eight-page section of the text (see HKG 3,1:95–102) is punctuated by a leitmotif-like complex of scheiden (to divide/separate) and its linguistic variants, all of which serve to underscore a variety of interconnections between Upper Austrian geography and Stifter's early autobiography. Thus, the wandering-narrating analogue of Stifter crosses a Scheidelinie (dividing line) but tarries at the abovementioned Scheidepunkt, reflecting on his recent separation or Scheiden from both his hometown of Oberplan and love interest Fanny Greipl, who resided in the nearby town of Friedberg and whose parents saw little if any professional promise in the likes of the young and dreamy “Bertl” Stifter.

Guy Gavriel Kay, a well-established Canadian fantasy writer, has accustomed his readers to a specific form of historical fantasy, which is grounded in history but uses the elements of the fantastic in order to detach the past from its particular settings and give it a more universal feel. The Fionavar Tapestry – his debut trilogy, which consists of The Summer Tree (1984), The Wandering Fire (1986), and The Darkest Road (1986) – is completely different, though. Epic in scale, the narrative relies on an extensive network of inspirations in its worldbuilding. Many of the elements are derived from medieval culture of both the early and high Middle Ages, most prominently the Arthurian legend. The novelist also borrows certain concepts from Eastern spirituality, and the trilogy encompasses the dualism of yin and yang, the necessity of harmony and balance, and the notion of reincarnation. Some aspects of Fionavar worldbuilding are also inspired by various world mythologies, including Norse, Celtic, and Greco-Roman myths. Taking into account Kay's engagement in editing J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion in the late 1970s, it is impossible not to notice Tolkienian inspirations either.

Origins

As this volume attests, crime fiction is popularly consumed and produced across Latin America. Its omnipresence would be a logical consequence in a region where social injustices and unrest, human rights abuses and political corruption have dominated, and continue to dominate, everyday life. This chapter outlines the history of the crime narrative and how it has been transposed by, for, and into a variety of Latin American contexts as original responses to the genre, giving an overview of the histories of crime fiction across some of Latin America's largest producers during the twentieth century. It charts instances where the genre has been reshaped and reapproached more recently and, finally, it considers the genre's flexibility and applicability across forms in the new millennium in Latin America.

US noir is where the origins of Latin American crime fiction as we know it lie. Where in the UK Christie's country houses allowed the reader insight into the workings of a minor upper-class mystery, Hammett and Chandler's US cityscapes unveiled unflinching visions of urban locations as the centre for crime and violence, inviting the reader to assess a panoramic view of the sordid, violent side of post-industrialised, post-crash US society. The crime narratives produced in the aftermath of this difficult and violent period, in particular hard-boiled detective fiction, such as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep of 1939, are often interpreted as the most clear-cut influences on what would become the contemporary Latin American crime fiction novel.

New histories of empire, colonialism, and commodity production show a particular concern with the impact of ‘global capitalism’ – concretely the commodification of land and labour – on the Global South. With few exceptions, commodification is associated with social and ecological disruption and the defensive strategies that local communities put up against world economic forces. These critical studies find easy targets in historical settler colonies and plantation economies because of the devastation they often wrought on resident and migrant labour populations, and sometimes on landscapes too. But they struggle to explain the growth of independent peasant production in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The general assumption is that small farmers were, if not coerced, at least duped into cash-crop production for global markets. Their choices were either to resist market pressures in the hope of maintaining their autonomy, or to adapt and become poor as a result.

This book has offered a counter-narrative to such overly pessimistic views on commodity production in the Global South, albeit a story with a tragic twist. In Angola, no empire, colonial state, or capitalist enterprise coaxed peasant households into coffee cultivation. The extension of the Angolan coffee frontier during the second half of the nineteenth century was mainly the work of small-scale farmers outside the proto-colonial enclaves of Portuguese Angola. Their entrepreneurship has not yet been sufficiently recognized in the historical literature, which has often likened African coffee production to foraging ‘wild’ coffee or improving spontaneous stands – not dissimilar to the arguments of colonial settlers, who, to boost their own image, depicted African producers as hopelessly inefficient.