Academic literature on the topic 'Latin poetry Appreciation'

Deklamasi Puisi comes from the Latin 'declare or declaim' which means reading the work in the form of poetry or rhymes accompanied by gestures and songs. Devoting poetry or short story has the meaning of reading. Reading poetry is a form of appreciation and artistic expression. This service activity is held for students of SMA Negeri 2 Kampar Kiri Tengah. Riau Province Government Requires this Reformation has proclaimed to foster and develop Malay culture and Malay culture (BMR) This activity to be held is to improve the ability to recite poetry which is expected to help students at SMA Negeri 2 Kampar Kiri Tengah to interpret/understand, train and practice good poetry reading, so that students at SMA Negeri 2 Kampar Kiri Tengah, with The arrival of the service team from the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Lancang Kuning University is expected to help the school and especially the students of SMA Negeri 2 Kampar Kiri Tengah to get to know Riau Malay Culture, especially the ability to pronounce.

First up for review here is a timely collection of essays edited by Joseph Farrell and Damien Nelis analysing the way the Republican past is represented and remembered in poetry from the Augustan era. Joining the current swell of scholarship on cultural and literary memory in ancient Greece and Rome, and building on work that has been done in the last decade on the relationship between poetry and historiography (such as Clio and the Poets, also co-edited by Nelis), this volume takes particular inspiration from Alain Gowing's Empire and Memory. The individual chapter discussions of Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, and Horace take up Gowing's project of exploring how memories of the Republic function in later literature, but the volume is especially driven by the idea of the Augustan era as a distinct transitional period during which the Roman Republic became history (Gowing, in contrast, began his own study with the era of Tiberius). The volume's premise is that the decades after Actium and the civil wars saw a particularly intense relationship develop with what was gradually becoming established, along with the Principate, as the ‘pre-imperial’ past, discrete from the imperial present and perhaps gone forever. In addition, in a thought-provoking afterword, Gowing suggests that this period was characterized by a ‘heightened sense of the importance and power of memory’ (320). And, as Farrell puts it in his own chapter on Camillus in Ovid's Fasti: ‘it was not yet the case that merely to write on Republican themes was, in effect, a declaration of principled intellectual opposition to the entire Imperial system’ (87). So this is a unique period, where the question of how the remembering of the Republican past was set in motion warrants sustained examination; the subject is well served by the fifteen individual case studies presented here (bookended by the stimulating intellectual overviews provided by the editors’ introduction and Gowing's afterword). The chapters explore the ways in which Augustan poetry was involved in creating memories of the Republic, through selection, omission, interpretation, and allusion. A feature of this poetry that emerges over the volume is that the history does not usually take centre stage; rather, references to the past are often indirect and tangential, achieved through the generation and exploitation of echoes between history and myth, and between past and present. This overlaying crops up in many guises, from the ‘Roman imprints’ on Virgil's Trojan story in Aeneid 2 (Philip Hardie's ‘Trojan Palimpsests’, 117) to the way in which anxieties about the civil war are addressed through the figure of Camillus in Ovid's Fasti (Farrell) or Dionysiac motifs in the Aeneid (Fiachra Mac Góráin). In this poetry, history is often, as Gowing puts it, ‘viewed through the prism of myth’ (325); but so too myth is often viewed through the prism of recent history and made to resonate with Augustan concerns, especially about the later Republic. The volume raises some important questions, several of which are articulated in Gowing's afterword. One central issue, relating to memory and allusion, has also been the subject of some fascinating recent discussions focused on ancient historiography, to which these studies of Augustan poetry now contribute: How and what did ancient writers and their audiences already know about the past? What kind of historical allusions could the poets be expecting their readers to ‘get’? Answers to such questions are elusive, and yet how we answer them makes such a difference to how we interpret the poems. So Jacqueline Febre-Serris, for instance, argues that behind Ovid's spare references to the Fabii in his Fasti lay an appreciation of a complex and contested tradition, which he would have counted on his readers sharing; while Farrell wonders whether Ovid, by omitting mention of Camillus’ exile and defeat of the Gauls, is instructing ‘the reader to remember Veii and to forget about exile and the Gauls’ or whether in fact ‘he counts on having readers who do not forget such things’ (70). In short this volume is an important contribution to the study of memory, history, and treatments of the past in Roman culture, which has been gathering increasing momentum in recent years. Like the conference on which it builds, the book has a gratifyingly international feel to it, with papers from scholars working in eight different countries across Europe and North America. Although all the chapters are in English, the imprint of current trends in non-Anglophone scholarship is felt across the volume in a way that makes Latin literature feel like a genuinely and excitingly global project. Rightly, Gowing points up the need for the sustained study of memory in the Augustan period to match that of Uwe Walter's thorough treatment of memory in the Roman republic; Walter's study ends with some provocative suggestions about the imperial era that indeed merit further investigation, and this volume has now mapped out some promising points of departure for such a study.

The essentially bilingual nature of Anglo-Saxon poetry is explored through the verse of two of the most prolific poets from the period, namely Alcuin and Cynewulf, composing primarily in Latin and Old English, respectively, but each reflecting knowledge and appreciation of verse in both languages. Both Alcuin and Cynewulf are shown to have consciously copied the works of their predecessors, and both in turn had their own verse evidently echoed by contemporary and later poets in both Anglo-Latin and Old English, so much so that they seem to have been the centres of closely identifiable �schools� of verse, active at around the same period, within a decade or two either side of the year 800, and sharing a similar background, attitude, and training. An Appendix considers the authorship and identity of Cynewulf, and suggests that, like Alcuin, he too may be best situated at the interface of orality and literacy in contemporary Northumbria.

The work “On Education” (De tradendis disciplinis) by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492/3–1540) is considered from the perspective of the use of ancient literature during the in-itial period of child school training (from 7 to 15 years). Vives’ appreciation of the Latin language, a positive attitude towards teaching Greek at school, and the influence of ancient languages on modern European languages — Italian, Spanish, and French are discussed. The article draws attention to some features in teaching the Latin language that are not characteristic of the hu-manists who preceded Vives and also wrote about school. They are as follows: using the native language as an instrument for mastering Latin at the initial stage of learning, and using modern literature - writers, grammarians, humanists, which helps to learn ancient languages in the subsequent period. These features can be explained by Vives’ epoch when national states were being estab-lished, national languages were strengthening, and pedagogical thinking was developing. The article also examines the issue brought up by Vives himself about the attitude to pagan literature and to some, in Vives’ opinion, morally questionable poets. With all the inconsistency of Vives and the low persuasiveness of his self-censorship, the solution to this problem comes down to se-lecting such authors the study of whose works will protect school students from vices. The article shows that both Latin and Greek literature (works on oratory, poetry, comedy, history, my-thology, etc.) are widely used in teaching. Ancient writings not only form and enrich the language, but also provide versatile knowledge, mainly of humanitarian kind, help to bring up an ed-ucated and cultured person. This is supported by a large survey of over 100 ancient authors, modern writers, scientists, humanists, early medieval writers, “church fathers”, publishers, translators, and commentators provided at the very end of Vives' discussion on education, with brief characteristics of many of them.

My appreciation of textual criticism – a nowadays somewhat marginalized subdiscipline that continues nevertheless to provide the foundation of our subject – has been vastly enhanced by Richard Tarrant's new book on the subject. I read it from cover to cover with great pleasure and satisfaction (several times laughing out loud, which doesn't happen often with works of scholarship), with great interest, and with dismay at my own ignorance, and I came away determined to be a better Classicist. This little volume is the fourteenth ‘suggestive essay’ published in CUP's Roman Literature and its Contexts series (established in 1990 by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds), but it does not – sadly – mark a revival of this excellent series, but rather a late addition. (There cannot be many Latinists of my generation who did not, as young scholars, aspire one day to be the author of one of these elegantly concise yet ground-breaking volumes.) On the face of it this volume is rather different from its predecessors, which usually engaged with cutting-edge theory from a Classical perspective; instead, Texts, Editors and Readers opens up to non-initiates such as myself a whole world of existing scholarship into which many literary scholars seldom venture, inhabited not only by the towering ‘heroic editors’ of the past (Chapter 1) but also by colourful characters such as ‘interpolation hunters’ (86), freewheeling neo-sceptics (77), elegant minimalists, and unrestrained maximalists. With a combination of vivid characterization, lucid explanation, and delicious detail, Tarrant outlines the challenges of establishing a decent text, and the techniques involved; in Chapters 3 to 5 we learn about recension, conjecture, interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality. He also makes exceptionally clear the issues that are at stake in editing a text, and the tensions with which the discipline is charged. At every stage of the process, from the selection of manuscripts for scrutiny to the display of information in the final edition, choices need to be made that are bound to provoke dissent. The twin aims of providing a legible text and legible apparatus are often in conflict with one another. Eventually, to establish a readable text, an editor needs to choose a single solution and put all alternatives in the apparatus, which must then record the evidence and the decision process as far as possible. Done well, it allows us to understand the process by which the text of the edition has been established, and the contributions made by scholars over the years. But within Classics there is no agreement about precisely how this should be achieved, as Tarrant points out. As he makes clear with his comparison of two reviews of the same edition, one reviewer's ‘accuracy’ and ‘methodological rigor’ is another's ‘frivolous superfluities’ (25–6). Tarrant comments that one would hardly believe these evaluations pertained to the same edition of Lucan, but in fact the picture is consistent and the divergence of opinion is telling; what comes across strongly is that these two reviewers want something very different from their editions. The disagreement here is between a scholar who wants progress towards a better text, amending scribal errors and providing confident, robust conjectures, and another who is glad to find a text relatively untouched, but in the apparatus all the material that enables a reader to come to their own decisions about the variants to be preferred. The merits of both are clear; the tensions are between the aspiration for a readable, usable text and the desire to be transparent about the difficulties involved in establishing that text. A decisive reading may obscure ambiguities; excessive hedging muddies the reading. Every choice involves compromise: minimalists may omit important information that might allow the reader to draw different conclusions; maximalists risk cluttering up the page and seeming undiscriminating. Tarrant (a self-confessed minimalist) alarms us on pages 130–1 with the sight of the monstrous apparatus produced by an unrestrained maximalist. Meanwhile, while conservative critics are averse to new conjectures and stick as close to the manuscript reading as possible, conjecture emerges as a creative art form, where natural talent is enhanced by intimate appreciation of Latin literature and style (73); it can attract great admiration. I now aspire to be able someday to compile, as Tarrant does, my own list of favourite conjectures – a bit like a montage of favourite sporting moments, as one revels in the pleasure of seeing the execution of skilful manoeuvres. Chapter 6 brings our attention to a representative case where textual tradition and literary interpretation cannot be disentangled: is Propertius a ‘difficult’ poet, prone to elliptical writing, or is he an elegant writer whose text has been unfortunately mangled in transmission? In other words, where the text is hard to understand, do we spend our energies reading his poetry as if he were a modernist poet, teasing out cryptic meaning, or do we channel our energies into amending the text to something more easily comprehensible? One's prejudice about the nature of Propertius’ poetry inevitably shapes one's approach to editing the text. The question is insoluble, but the debates thereby evoked are illuminating. As Chapter 2 makes clear, this is a discipline that relies on persuasion and is characterized by strong rhetoric; the contempt and disgust that are directed at fellow scholars and inferior manuscripts are remarkable. Language is often emotive and moralizing; the bracketing of problematic lines described as ‘a coward's remedy’ (86, n. 2). Tarrant himself, who takes a light and genial tone throughout, doesn't shy away from describing a certain practice of citing scholars in the apparatus criticus as ‘an abomination’ (161). One of many evocative details is the idea of Housman storing up denunciations of editorial vices without a particular target yet in mind (68). Traditionally, self-belief and decisive authority have been the hallmarks of the ‘heroic’ style of editing, and these qualities are especially unfashionable in our own era, which prizes the acknowledgement of ambiguity and hermeneutic openness. Tarrant encourages us to accept that the notions of the ‘recoverable original’ or the ‘definitive edition’ are myths, but at the same time to acknowledge that they are necessary myths (40) for this ‘doomed yet noble’ endeavour (156). A critical edition is no more nor less than a provisional ‘working hypothesis’ which invites continued and continual engagement. As Tarrant puts it: ‘any edition, to the degree that it stimulates thinking about the text, begins the process that will lead to its being succeeded by another edition’ (147). Textual criticism should be, therefore, a collaborative endeavour to be marked by humility and an acceptance of the open-endedness of interpretation, of the hermeneutic work that an editor needs to undertake, and also of the overlap between the roles of editor and reader. It is easy to perceive textual criticism – with its heyday in the nineteenth century – as constituting the dry and dusty past of Classics, and indeed Tarrant treats us to a most entertaining account of its Heroic Age, when Housman et al. lashed one another with cruel wit and erudite put-downs. However, Tarrant also makes an irrefutable case for the continued relevance, and indeed the exciting future, of textual criticism – despite the fact that it has lost its position at the centre of our discipline, and so many of us are untrained and unable to appreciate its value. Tarrant's depiction of the discipline brings home the lesson – which we already knew, but now really get – that all classical scholars ought accordingly to be aware of these general issues and to have some grasp of the specific routes by which the text they are reading has been reached, the problematic aspects of that text, and the issues involved in attempting to resolve its problems. Such is the information that an apparatus criticus attempts to convey, and it may therefore be judged on how effectively and efficiently it does so. Having made all of this so clear and in such an engaging fashion, Tarrant concludes by providing as an appendix a helpful guide for the inexperienced to reading a critical apparatus. The final chapters explore two questions in particular: what can technological advances contribute (for instance in access to and presentation of manuscripts), and is the current model of the apparatus criticus fit for purpose? On the latter issue, Tarrant would like to see, at the very least, more scope for providing in the notes nuanced indication of the editor's feelings about the choices he or she has made. He proposes the wider use of phrases that allude to the internal struggles behind a rejected variant, for instance (such as utinam recte or aegre reieco) or the introduction of new symbols for the apparatus that would signal degrees of suspicion – although he doesn't go quite so far as to second Donaldson's suggestion for a pictorial symbol of ‘a small ostrich, with head in the sand’ to denote occasions where an editor follows a manuscript out of despair of making actual sense of the text (58, n. 25). Early in his essay, Tarrant expresses regret that new editions are less likely to be reviewed than other forms of scholarship, and, with the decline in the requisite editorial knowhow, it easy to see why: reviewing a new edition of a text is not a job that can be undertaken with confidence by most scholars of Latin literature. How can one pass judgement on an editor's decisions without a very sound knowledge not only of the work but also of the manuscripts available, of the relationships between them, and of the subsequent critical tradition? How can one comment on individual amendments or conjectures without an understanding of the entire interpretative framework which the critic has brought to bear? One of the many valuable things I have learned from Tarrant's book is that it not always necessary to comment on individual cruces; equally useful can be an evaluation of the general approach and principles upon which an edition is both established and communicated.

Mairéad McAuley frames her substantial study of the representation of motherhood in Latin literature in terms of highly relevant modern concerns, poignantly evoked by her opening citation of Eurydice's lament at her baby's funeral in Statius’ Thebaid 6: what really makes a mother? Biology? Care-giving? (Grief? Loss? Suffering?) How do the imprisoning stereotypes of patriarchy interact with lived experiences of mothers or with the rich metaphorical manifestations of maternity (as the focus of fear and awe, for instance, or of idealizing aesthetics, of extreme political rhetoric, or as creativity and the literary imagination?) How do individuals, texts, and societies negotiate maternity's paradoxical relationship to power? Conflicting issues of maternal power and disempowerment run through history, through Latin literature, and through the book. McAuley's focus is the representational work that mothers do in Latin literature, and she pursues this through close readings of works by Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, and Statius, by re-reading their writings in a way that privileges the theme, perspective, or voice of the mother. A lengthy introduction sets the parameters of the project and its aim (which I judge to be admirably realized) to establish a productive dialogue between modern theory (especially psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy) and ancient literature. Her study evokes a dialogue that speaks to theory – even contributes to it – but without stripping the Latin literature of its cultural specificity (and without befuddling interpretation of Latin culture with anachronism and jargon, which is often the challenge). The problem for a Latinist is that psychoanalysis is, as McAuley says, ‘not simply a body of theories about human development, it is also a mode of reading’ (23), and it is a mode of reading often at cross-purposes with the aims of literary criticism in Classical Studies: psychoanalytical notions of the universal and the foundational clash with aspirations to historical awareness and appreciation of the specifics of genre or historical moment. Acknowledging – and articulating with admirable clarity and honesty – the methodological challenges of her approach, McAuley practises what she describes as ‘reading-in-tension’ (25), holding on not only to the contradictions between patriarchal texts and their potentially subversive subtexts but also to the tense conversation between modern theory and ancient literary representation. As she puts it in her epilogue, one of her aims is to ‘release’ mothers’ voices from the pages of Latin literature in the service of modern feminism, while simultaneously preserving their alterity: ‘to pay attention to their specificity within the contexts of text, genre, and history, but not to reduce them to those contexts, in order that they speak to us within and outside them at the same time’ (392). Although McAuley presents her later sections on Seneca and Statius as the heart of the book, they are preceded by two equally weighty contributions, in the form of chapters on Virgil and Ovid, which she rightly sees as important prerequisites to understanding the significance of her later analyses. In these ‘preliminary’ chapters (which in another book might happily have been served as the main course), she sets out the paradigms that inform those discussions of Seneca and Statius’ writings. In her chapter on Virgil McAuley aims to transcend the binary notion that a feminist reading of epic entails either reflecting or resisting patriarchal values. As ‘breeders and mourners of warriors…mothers are readily incorporated into the generic code’ of epic (65), and represent an alternative source of symbolic meaning (66). Her reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses then shows how the poem brings these alternative subjects into the foreground of his own poetry, where the suffering and passion of mothers take centre-stage, allowing an exploration of imperial subjectivity itself. McAuley points out that even feminist readings can often contribute to the erasure of the mother's presence by their emphasis on the patriarchal structures that subjugate the female, and she uses a later anecdote about Octavia fainting at a reading of the Aeneid as a vivid illustration of a ‘reparative reading’ of Roman epic through the eyes of a mother (91–3). Later, in her discussion of mothers in Statian epic, McAuley writes: ‘mothers never stand free of martial epic nor are they fully constituted by it, and, as such, may be one of the most appropriate figures with which to explore issues of belatedness and authority in the genre’ (387). In short, the discourse of motherhood in Latin literature is always revealed to be powerfully implicated in the central issues of Roman literature and culture. A chapter is devoted to the themes of grief, virtue, and masculinity as explored in Seneca's consolation to his own mother, before McAuley turns her attention to the richly disturbing mothers of Senecan tragedy and Statius’ Thebaid. The book explores the metaphorical richness of motherhood in ancient Rome and beyond, but without losing sight of its corporeality, seeking indeed to complicate the long-developed binary distinction between physical reproduction (gendered as female) and abstract reproduction and creativity (gendered as male). This is a long book, but it repays careful reading, and then a return to the introduction via the epilogue, so as to reflect anew on McAuley's thoughtful articulation of her methodological choices. Her study deploys psychoanalytical approaches to reading Latin literature to excellent effect (not an easy task), always enhancing the insights of her reading of the ancient texts, and maintaining lucidity. Indeed, this is the best kind of gender study, which does not merely apply the modern framework of gender and contemporary theoretical approaches to ancient materials (though it does this very skilfully and convincingly), but in addition makes it clear why this is such a valuable endeavour for us now, and how rewarding it can be to place modern psychoanalytic theories into dialogue with the ancient Roman literature. The same tangle of issues surrounding maternity as emerges from these ancient works often persists into our modern era, and by probing those issues with close reading we risk learning much about ourselves; we learn as much when the ancient representations fail to chime with our expectations.

The few remaining fragments from the works of the Latin poet Cornelius Gallus (c. 70-26 BC), discovered in Egypt in 1978, are presented, translated and analyzed in this paper. The role of these works among the books dated from the time of the poet, as well as some critical appreciation left by poets that lived during the Augustan reign and elected Cornelius Gallus as a model, are also brought into discussion. In addition, a poetic translation is also suggested.

<span style="font-family: Times-Roman; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times-Roman; font-size: small;"><p>ABSTRACT: The few remaining fragments from the works of the Latin poet Cornelius Gallus (c. 70-26 BC), discovered in Egypt in 1978, are presented, translated and analyzed in this paper. The role of these works among the books dated from the time of the poet, as well as some critical appreciation left by poets that lived during the Augustan reign and elected Cornelius Gallus as a model, are also brought into discussion. In addition, a poetic translation is also suggested.</p> <p>KEYWORDS: Cornelius Gallus (c. 70-26 BC); epigram; elegy; poetic translation; elegiac couplet.</p></span></span>

AbstractConnections between Andreas and Beowulf have been the subject of much scholarly discussion. This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that the account of the Mermedonians’ discovery of and response to the loss of their prisoners in Andreas fitt X, which corresponds to chapters 22–3 of the poet’s putative Latin source, has been deliberately recast in ways intended to recall the account in fitt II of Beowulf of Grendel’s first attack on Heorot and the reactions of the Danish community. The connection argued for here is based not on verbal correspondences, but on embedded structural and thematic parallels. The Andreas-poet emerges as a careful and sophisticated reader, notable for their specifically literate and textual engagement with Beowulf. This observation has implications not only for our appreciation of the Andreas-poet’s art, but also for the transmission of Beowulf and for our understanding of Old English poetic practices more generally.

This time last year my review concluded with the observation that the future for the study of Latin literature is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and that we should proceed in close dialogue with social historians and art historians. In the intervening period, two books from a new generation of scholars have been published which remind us of the existence of an alternative tide that is pushing back against such culturally embedded criticism, and urging us to turn anew towards the aesthetic. The very titles of these works, with their references to ‘The Sublime’ and ‘Poetic Autonomy’ are redolent of an earlier age in their grandeur and abstraction, and in their confident trans-historicism. Both monographs, in different ways, are seeking to find a new means of grounding literary criticism in reaction to the disempowerment and relativism which is perceived to be the legacy of postmodernism. In their introductions, both bring back to centre stage theoretical controversies that were a prominent feature of scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s (their dynamics acutely observed by Don Fowler in his own Greece & Rome subject reviews of the period) but which have largely faded into the background; the new generation of Latinists tend to have absorbed insights of New Historicism and postmodernism without feeling the need either to defend their importance or to reflect upon their limitations. Henry Day, in his study of the sublime in Lucan's Bellum civile, explicitly responds to the challenges issued by Charles Martindale, who has, of course, continued (in his own words) to wage ‘war against the determination of classicists to ground their discipline in “history”’. Day answers Martindale's call for the development of some new form of aesthetic criticism, where hermeneutics and the search for meaning are replaced with (or, better, complemented by) experiential analysis; his way forward is to modify Martindale's pure aesthetics, since he expresses doubt that beauty can be wholly free of ideology, or that aesthetics can be entirely liberated from history, context, and politics. Reassuringly (for the novices among us), Day begins by admitting that the question ‘What is the sublime?’ is a ‘perplexing’ one, and he starts with the definition of it as ‘a particular kind of subjective experience…in which we encounter an object that exceeds our everyday categories of comprehension’ (30). What do they have in common, then, the versions of the sublime, ancient and modern, outlined in Chapter 1: the revelatory knowledge afforded to Lucretius through his grasp of atomism, the transcendent power of great literature for Longinus, and the powerful emotion engendered in the Romantics by the sight of impressive natural phenomena such as a mountain range or a thunderstorm? One of the key ideas to emerge from this discussion – crucial to the rest of the book – is that the sublime is fundamentally about power, and especially the transference of power from the object of contemplation to its subject. The sublime is associated with violence, trauma, and subjugation, as it rips away from us the ground on which we thought we stood; yet it does not need to be complicit with the forces of oppression but can also work for resistance and retaliation. This dynamic of competing sublimes of subjugation and liberation will then help us, throughout the following chapters, to transcend the nihilism/engagement dichotomy that has polarized scholarship on Lucan in recent decades. In turn, Lucan's deployment of the sublime uses it to collapse the opposition between liberation and oppression, and thus the Bellum civile makes its own contribution to the history of the sublime. This is an impressive monograph, much more productively engaged with the details of Lucan's poem than this summary is able to convey; it brought me to a new appreciation of the concept of the sublime, and a new sense of excitement about Lucan's epic poem and its place in the Western tradition.

Chapter 4 suggests that, by linking their own writing to that of an author they admire through quotation, allusion or reference, Méndez Guédez, Chirinos and Zupcic both counter Venezuela’s literary isolation and explore issues of particular importance to them. Through playful references to other writers, Chulapos Mambo (Méndez Guédez, 2011) draws attention to the limited access to international literary developments in Venezuela. In addition, real Latin American writers appear throughout the story, most notably Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echinique, two writers who, like Méndez Guédez, have been judged negatively for their political beliefs. In El niño malo… (Chirinos, 2004), as well as integrating fragments of Eugenio Montejo’s poems into the narrative, Chirinos makes the poet one of the main characters of his story. This allows Chirinos to both pay homage to Montejo and to contemplate his own experience of being Venezuelan abroad. In Círculo croata (2006), Zupcic honours Salvador Prasel, a Croatian emigrant who became a writer in Venezuela, while also linking Prasel to William Faulkner, allowing Zupcic to allude to Faulkner’s appreciation for Venezuelan literature.