Abstract/Summary

En diciembre llegaban las brisas (1987) by the Colombian writer Marvel Moreno has been largely excluded from literary history. The little critical work on the text has simply read it as a critique of patriarchy. However, as this article demonstrates, it is arguably one of the most important works of Latin American literature of the late twentieth century. I argue that the novel situates its feminist discourse in a complex theoretical framework constructed around the master narratives of modernity and their critiques, registering the contradictory transformations of twentieth-century modernity and the unravelling of its metanarratives in an increasingly postmodern world. Yet in showing how this does not simply reinforce a teleological shift from the modern to the postmodern, Boom to Post-Boom, Cold War to neoliberalism, this article goes even further to demonstrate that the novel’s multiple temporalities and complex ideological frameworks complicate the predominant paradigms of Latin American literary studies.