Document Type

Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.13135/1592-4467/12632

Journal Title

RSA Journal

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

This article poses an alternative non-Anglophone starting point for twenty-first century maximalism through the Latin American Boom and “la novela total” that is its crowning achievement. Among such works are Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra (1975). The term’s 1960s conception by Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa predates Thomas Pynchon as figurehead for maximalist theorizing within First World academic environments that control the conversation. Furthermore, I examine Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) as a case of post-Boom(er) maximalism that differs from the big novels of the Latin American luminaries. Luiselli updates the heroic and “masculine” standards of “la novela total” based in an Archive of New World history that is the well of its authorial genius. Luiselli writes a first-personal account of the US-Mexico immigration crisis and its human collateral in the form of children. This disenfranchisement of Central American refugees peaks during the Obama era and worsens under the Trump presidency.

Comments

RSAJournal (Rivista di Studi Americani, ISSN 1592-4467) is the official journal of AISNA, the Italian Association of North American Studies. It is devoted to all areas of American Studies—including literary and cultural studies, media studies, history, and political science—and aims to foster the debate on the history, impact, and issues of U.S. civilization within a global scholarly context.

Publisher Statement

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. 

RSAJournal will apply a CC BY 4.0 license to all its published materials starting with issue 37 (2026). Issues up to no. 36/2025 included were published under a CC BY-NC-ND licence. 

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