Description: In Pirate Novels Nina Gerassi-Navarro examines an over-looked genre to reveal how history and fiction blend to address important issues of nation building in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In the figure of the pirate, bold and heroic to some, cruel and criminal to others, she finds an almost ideal character that came to embody the spirit of emerging nationhood and its attendant violence.

Beginning with an overview of the history of piracy, Gerassi-Navarro traces the icon of the pirate through colonial-era chronicles before exploring a group of nineteenth-century Mexican, Colombian, and Argentine novels. She argues that the authors of these novels, in their reconstructions of the past, dispensed with accurate representations and used their narratives instead to discuss the futures of their own countries. In reading these swashbucklers as metaphors for nation building in Spanish America, Gerassi-Navarro exposes the conflicting strains of a complex culture attempting to shape those futures. She shows how pirate stories reflect the ongoing debates that marked the consolidation of nationhood, as well as the extent to which the narratives of national identity in Spanish America were structured in relation to European cultures, and how questions of race and gender were addressed. With a unique reading of the cultural and political paradigms that marked the literary production of nineteenth-century Spanish America, Pirate Novels expands the range of texts usually examined in the study of nation building.

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