Sí Pero No Fabian Dobles and the Postcolonial Challenge

Costa Rican novelist Fabian Dobles (1918 - 1997) is arguably one of the most important formative writers within the context of Costa Rican and Central American literary history. Yet until now there has been no book-length analysis in either English or Spanish of his narrative contributions. Isolated studies generally place him within the realist and regionalist tendencies of the period and emphasize his mimetic representation of the world. This book, however, reevaluates Dobles' novels and short stories from the perspective of subaltern and postcolonial studies and offers the first theoretically consistent, comprehenisve analysis of his narrative corpus. The book's introduction places Dobles in historical perspective and compares his work to that of his predecessors and contemporaries both from Costa Rica and the broader regional context of Central and South American letters. Each chapter focuses on one or more of his novels or collections of short stories and presents an overview of critical reception from the time of publication to the present. The subsequent analyses are thoroughly grounded in the socioeconomic, political, and historical issues that underpin each text and focus particularly on those issues that preoccupy postcolonial theorists (language, representation, hybridity, resistance, nationalism). Gonzalez argues that Dobles' position on these issues has played a vital role in the formation of Costa Rican national identity, that is, how Costa Ricans imagine, project, and remember themselves. The conclusion of the book outlines the Dobles legacy and contemporary response to his work by younger Costa Rican writers. Gonzalez, who is related by marriage to Dobles, has had unique access to family documents and opportunities to interview family members. As a result, she has compiled the most complete bibliography to date on Dobles' fifty-year writing career. Her documentation of the multitude of papers, clippings, and photographs belonging to the Dobles estate and private collections of various fa