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.

In 1863, Smetana expanded his involvement in various societies and music associations, actively organizing, educating, and composing. On March 9, 1863, the Artists’ Society was officially founded at a convention, with Josef Wenzig—who would later write libretti for Smetana's Dalibor and Libuše—elected as president. Smetana was appointed head of the Music Department, and several close friends, including Procházka, joined the Society's board. The new organization quickly demonstrated its progressive goals.

During this period, Smetana also focused on the Harrach opera award, urging the theater to push the jurors to expedite their decision. However, the theater's music director, Maýr—whose opera, Horymír's Leap, was also in the competition—showed little interest in speeding up the process. Written in the traditional Italian style, Horymír's Leap reflected the conservative styles Maýr favored, and he was unwilling to assist Smetana, a rising competitor. Consequently, it took three and a half years for the jurors to reach a verdict. On March 25, 1866, the jury awarded the prize to Smetana's opera, praising its exceptional composition. Although the work did not fully meet the requirement of possessing “a true national character,” it was recognized for its other remarkable qualities.

The New Institute

During this period, Smetana realized he could no longer count on being appointed music director of the Interim Theater and decided to revive his music institute, this time in partnership with his friend Ferdinand Heller.

Crime fiction in Argentina has a longstanding, robust and complex tradition. While lack of prestige impeded early development of the genre, the involvement of Jorge Luis Borges with detective fiction helped dignify it, and many major Argentine writers have cultivated crime fiction. Writer Sergio Olguin has proclaimed detective fiction to be the genre that best represents Argentine literature, citing its crucial function in representing Argentine political and social reality. ‘Detective fiction has totally invaded literature’, states writer Pablo De Santis, who conceives its fundamental premise as inherent to national mentality: ‘The idea of telling a story that connects to another hidden story is something that is in our narrative unconscious.’

Argentina has the distinction of producing the first work of detective fiction in the Spanish language: La huella de un crimen (Footprint of a Crime) (1877), by Raul Waleis, pseudonym for Luis V. Varela. The early period of the genre in Argentina spanned from 1877 to 1912, and its best-known practitioners, along with Waleis/ Varela, include Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, Paul Groussac, Horacio Quiroga and Vicente Rossi. Several factors conditioned the appearance of detective literature in Argentina in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The Argentine Generation of 1880 – a group of elite liberal writers focused on forming a national literature and social project – held a positivist ideology with an interest in the scientific resources that the detective uses in his investigation.

While crime fiction is big business and sells very well, it still carries a whiff of the stigma of a lower-brow, non-serious genre. Bookstores usually have a separate ‘Crime’ section set apart from the ‘Fiction’ section, and academics and literary critics sometimes react sniffily when a colleague reveals that they are studying or conducting research on ‘Crime Fiction’. There is no doubt that crime fiction can be trivial and does almost always fulfil an entertainment brief (hence its massive popularity). However, it can also be challenging and complex, both in terms of individual texts and as a phenomenon. Much crime fiction, for example, has a significant degree of psychological depth, particularly when involving domestic contexts or human relationships, not to mention when dealing with perpetrators, as in, for instance, Patricia Highsmith's famous Ripley novels. Other works, even popular ones, involve intricate plots or cerebral puzzle-solving by the detective. Many mainstream detectives or detective figures meantime are themselves often melancholy, troubled and multidimensional individuals (starting with Sherlock Holmes and including latterly the likes of Morse, Rebus, Martin Beck, Kurt Wallander, Harry Hole, Tony Hill, Marnie Rome, Lisbeth Salander and so many more). Moreover, it is increasingly the case that many crime narratives take place in the context of social, political, industrial or financial corruption, often offering disturbing insights into modern society or anxiety-inducing unanswered questions. Issues of gender, race and class frequently complicate the dynamics of the genre even further. And there are plenty of examples of literary crime fiction with a perplexing philosophical, existential or cod-historical dimension (Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, Mark Haddon and so on).

THERE HAVE BEEN few if any composers with interests as varied as Wagner’s, and certainly none has devoted so much time to weighing in on matters other than the purely musical. His Gesamtkunstwerk was to fuse poetry, music, dramatic action, dance, and the scenic arts, but even this was not enough for him; he read and wrote on history, geography, literary theory, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, too, setting out his ideas in letters, articles, and books, and urging his favorite authors on his friends.

This sounds like the worst kind of dilettantism and intellectual overreaching. The composer Peter Cornelius, later a friend, had gently mocked him when he had his barber of Baghdad claim to be a comprehensive genius, ein Gesamtgenie. Later generations have been less kind on this score and not at all affectionate. Wagner's claims were so immodest, and his personal qualities so mixed—to put it mildly—that we almost want him to fail at least somewhere. What Auden saw in him sounds like a cosmic injustice: by what rights could such “an extraordinary genius” also be “an absolute shit?”

Wagner's legion of adoring friends would have disagreed, but that combination may well be the truth, hard though it is to swallow. It is difficult to deny Wagner's greatness as a composer, though there are those who do, and his theatrical craft can hardly be gainsaid. He was indeed a master of the art of transition, and the music dramas are object lessons in structuring the ebb and flow of long works; even a merely competent performance will hold one's interest.