Exploring Costa Rican Literature

Photo Credit: Abee5 / CC BY 2.0

In addition to travel guides, maps, history lessons, and exploration, you can learn much about a country by diving into its literature.  When packing your bags, consider Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Barbara Ras, to enjoy the colorful and rich stories of Costa Rica’s authors. In the Foreword to the collection, Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, writes:

It is well known…that our country occupies an isthmus and is in geological terms quite young—a combination which allows for a nearly unparalleled topographic, climatic, and biological diversity that has had important consequences for our people.  It is not, therefore, surprising that Costa Rican writers reflect in their works the environmental and cultural differences that contribute to creating Costa Rica’s collective identity.

As Costa Rica is young geologically, so is its literary tradition.  The roots of Costa Rican literature, which date back to the end of the nineteenth century, have grown with colonization and European influence.  Despite this influence, however, Costa Rican literature is uniquely characterized by the environmental and cultural diversity of a beautiful country.

Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion is a collection of twenty-six stories from twenty different Costa Rican authors of the twentieth century.  The stories are organized by region, and the stories are set “in the plains of Guanacaste, in the high valleys of the central plateau, and in the flatlands of the north and the Caribbean coast.”  The anthology provides the reader with a diverse and authentic sampling of Costa Rica’s writers, environments, and ideas.

To pay homage to Costa Rica’s literary tradition and talented writers, weekly posts will feature the authors and their works anthologized in this collection.  Happy reading to fellow travelers!

Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014 at 6:59 am. It is filed under Creative Culture, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.