Agrarian Questions

Latin America's agrarian novels didn't just document a revolution, they chronicled the birth of a new world.

Between 1910 and 1960, Latin America was radically transformed as rural societies became urban and peasants were pushed into precarious wage labor. The Latin American novel became the key witness to this upheaval, revealing capitalism’s violent remaking of the countryside.

Agrarian Questions traces how writers from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela portrayed different paths to capitalism, blending folk storytelling with modernist form. Beckman shows how these novels illuminate the reshaping of land and labor—insights that resonate today, as much of the world now lives in urban precarity.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 NovelEricka Beckman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is author of Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age.