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Beginning in the late-nineteenth and continuing into the early-twentieth century, Latin American authors developed works belonging to the literary genre called la novela de la selva. This literary phenomenon was similar to the regional and romantic novels of the nineteenth century, but focused specifically on the jungle. In la novela de la selva, nature becomes its own protagonist, emphasizing the uniqueness of Latin America (León Hazera 12).1 Like the regional novel, la novela de la selva was a literary manifestation recognizing Latin American civilization as different from Europe. It arose from "the belief that literature was an agent of national integration and that through it, divergent areas and peoples could be brought into the stream of national culture" (Franco 193). Through la novela de la selva, authors analyzed their countries from a postcolonial perspective and often critiqued the national, political landscape (Wylie, Colonial 15). In addition to self-reflecting on their nations, works of literature belonging to the genre of la novela de la selva serve as mechanisms to aid in the formation of what Benedict Anderson describes as "imagined communities." Anderson emphasizes that the "convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation" (46). Following this line of thinking, in this study I will focus on two texts from la novela de la selva'. La vorágine (1924) by Colombian José Eustasio Rivera, and Brazilian Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma
