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    Agrarian Questions

    The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism

    Author Ericka Beckman
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    Paperback
    $34.95 US
    | $45.95 CAN
    Verso Books | Verso
    20 per carton
    On sale Jul 07, 2026 | 256 Pages | 9781836743392
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    LATIN AMERICA’S AGRARIAN NOVELS CHRONICLED THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD

    Between 1910 and 1970, Latin America experienced a rapid and radical transformation. Rural societies became urban, and peasants found themselves forced into precarious wage labor. The Latin American novel became the key witness to this upheaval, revealing capitalism’s violent remaking of country and city alike.

    In Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman shows how these novels illuminate an epochal reshaping of land and labor—gifting readers with insights that continue to resonate in a world of increasing urban precarity.
    "A landmark work of literary economy and a fascinating dive into how the power of Latin American fiction emerged out of the combined and uneven development and misery of rural Latin America. Beckman’s prose is politically alive, illuminating both Latin America’s literary traditions and its capitalist development."
    —Greg Grandin, author of America, América

    "Constitutes the most significant study of the relationship between rural decline, capitalism, and the novel form in any literary tradition."
    —Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism

    "If I had to pick one book to pair with Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums for the twenty-first-century sequel to Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, it would undoubtedly be Beckman’s Agrarian Questions."
    —Colleen Lye, coeditor of After Marx

    "Ericka Beckman once again makes evident the richness of literary studies and its relevance for historical and contemporary analysis of our global geopolitical order."
    —María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given

    "With Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman is proven to be one of the foremost representatives of a tradition of historical-materialist Latin Americanist scholarship and criticism."
    —Neil Larsen, author of Determinations
    Ericka Beckman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is author of Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age.
    Ericka Beckman View titles by Ericka Beckman
    Introduction: Agrarian Questions, Novel Answers
    Chapter One: Wither the Latifundio? Landowner Romance
    Chapter Two: How Are Oligarchies Unmade? Landowner Realism
    Chapter Three: How do Peasants Become (Doubly) Free? Modern Agrarian Epic
    Chapter Four : How Long Can the Peasantry Last? Anti-Epics of Rural Immiseration
    Chapter Five: What Are Cities Made of? The Boom’s Vanishing Agrarian Mediators
    Coda: What’s Left of the Countryside? The 21st-Century Post-Agrarian Novel

    About

    LATIN AMERICA’S AGRARIAN NOVELS CHRONICLED THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD

    Between 1910 and 1970, Latin America experienced a rapid and radical transformation. Rural societies became urban, and peasants found themselves forced into precarious wage labor. The Latin American novel became the key witness to this upheaval, revealing capitalism’s violent remaking of country and city alike.

    In Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman shows how these novels illuminate an epochal reshaping of land and labor—gifting readers with insights that continue to resonate in a world of increasing urban precarity.

    Reviews

    "A landmark work of literary economy and a fascinating dive into how the power of Latin American fiction emerged out of the combined and uneven development and misery of rural Latin America. Beckman’s prose is politically alive, illuminating both Latin America’s literary traditions and its capitalist development."
    —Greg Grandin, author of America, América

    "Constitutes the most significant study of the relationship between rural decline, capitalism, and the novel form in any literary tradition."
    —Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism

    "If I had to pick one book to pair with Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums for the twenty-first-century sequel to Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, it would undoubtedly be Beckman’s Agrarian Questions."
    —Colleen Lye, coeditor of After Marx

    "Ericka Beckman once again makes evident the richness of literary studies and its relevance for historical and contemporary analysis of our global geopolitical order."
    —María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given

    "With Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman is proven to be one of the foremost representatives of a tradition of historical-materialist Latin Americanist scholarship and criticism."
    —Neil Larsen, author of Determinations

    Author

    Ericka Beckman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is author of Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age.
    Ericka Beckman View titles by Ericka Beckman

    Table of Contents

    Introduction: Agrarian Questions, Novel Answers
    Chapter One: Wither the Latifundio? Landowner Romance
    Chapter Two: How Are Oligarchies Unmade? Landowner Realism
    Chapter Three: How do Peasants Become (Doubly) Free? Modern Agrarian Epic
    Chapter Four : How Long Can the Peasantry Last? Anti-Epics of Rural Immiseration
    Chapter Five: What Are Cities Made of? The Boom’s Vanishing Agrarian Mediators
    Coda: What’s Left of the Countryside? The 21st-Century Post-Agrarian Novel

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