According to Alejo Carpentier, Christopher Columbus rounded, rounded off and rounded up the planet. The cost was very high for the indigenous cultures of ‘nuestra América’ [our America]. Gradually, a new culture was founded made of all possible hybrids, that came from Europe, Africa and Asia. Carpentier himself also stated that, in order for the novel to exist, there must be a tradition of the novel; the first narrative manifestations were for domestic consumption: we would have to wait for the mid-twentieth century to begin what would soon become an avalanche. It was the return to Europe of the ships that once left Palos de Moguer, the carriers of another culture.

Several concomitant factors contributed to this reception in Europe. In post-war Europe, new curiosities were being awakened. André Malraux published his Musée imaginaire, thereby breaking the traditional Eurocentric hierarchy that gave Europe a civilizing mission in the face of the barbarism represented by the unfamiliar.

The perception of Gabriela Mistral and her poetry has transformed over the years: the image of Mistral as the traditionalist and conservative poet, fostered by the Pinochet dictatorship, has been replaced by that of a strong independent voice who, in part, stands for the liberation from society’s gender prescriptions. This chapter focuses on the series of poetry, Locas mujeres (Madwomen), published in Lagar (Winepress, 1954), to demonstrate how this new perception of Mistral holds true in her representation of women in these poems. In line with Mistral’s earlier poetry that underscores women’s voices that have typically not been heard, such as those of the pregnant women of Poemas de las madres (The Mothers’ Poems), the women from this series, designated “insane” by the title, and society, expose their true selves. This chapter first places this whole series in the context of Mistral’s poetry, and finally focuses on two poems, “La bailarina” (“The Dancer”) and “La que camina” (“She Who Walks”), to demonstrate their particular expressions of women’s liberty.

A series of wars and revolutions provide the fiery, unsettled bedrock for mid-twentieth-century Latin American literature: on a global scale, World War II and the Cold War mar political alliances; the Cuban Revolution, Peronist Argentina, and the 1968 student movements are some of the regional responses that develop from these international conflicts. Latching onto a transforming world, authors in this era appropriate the discomfort of transition to produce literary works of international acclaim. Mid-century Latin American literature has been framed as a market-driven phenomenon that opened the region up through an exoticization that captured international recognition. This volume takes a different approach, one that rests uncomfortably on a deep political instability – worldwide as well as regional – that is engaged aesthetically by literary authors. It argues that the literature of mid-century Latin America locates its strength within global and regional political conflicts, as well as from within the cultural and social tensions spurred on by economic disparities.

The decade of the 1960s provoked a specific interest in Latin America and its literature, largely owing to the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the attention it paid to the struggle in the cultural field. If until that point the continent’s great writers were perceived as isolated figures, the new context after 1959 created the conditions for them to be read as part of a group that was committed to the common duty of putting a new face on Latin American literature. In fact, the so-called Boom cannot be understood without considering the specific political context that acted as its sounding board. An intrinsic part of the atmosphere at the time, then, were heated debates that foregrounded the role of the intellectual in society, intense polemics regarding the limits of freedom of expression under socialism, and fiery conflicts about the status of literature in a revolutionary society. Paradoxically, the very same period was also seen by its protagonists as one of transition toward a new, as yet undefined, stage. If the decade of the 1960s was dominated by left-wing thought and by the idea of the continental revolution, the 1970s meant the withdrawal of the left, and a gradual rise for the right. In its own way – always and naturally tangentially – literature has narrated all those transitions.

One of the few incontrovertible assumptions concerning human personality is that it is influenced and determined by a wide range of factors. Of major importance are individual differences in genetic factors. This was shown very clearly by Vukasović and Bratko (2015) in their meta-analytic review of twin, family and adoption studies designed to assess the percentage of individual differences attributable to genetic factors for major personality factors or dimensions. With respect to H. J. Eysenck’s three orthogonal dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism (see H. J. Eysenck & M. Eysenck, 1985), the percentage figure ranged between 30 percent for psychoticism and 42 percent for neuroticism (which closely resembles trait anxiety).

‘The Child is Father of the Man’, wrote British poet William Wordsworth (1807), reflecting upon the consistency of an individual's emotional responses through the long human lifespan. Soon afterwards, Mendelian and Darwinian genetics and the still controversial concept of early life programming indicated plausible biological bases for Wordsworth's artistic muse. Now, nearly two centuries later, many readily accept that part of our individual emotional compass is constrained by events affecting the development of the brain before birth, effects that persist for life, defining parameters upon which nurture and the adult environment exert their modifying effects. For genetics, the effects of classically inherited genes and chromosomal variation confirm the fundamental nature of inheritance of traits. Here we address the role of a specific aspect of the early life environment upon the lifelong characteristics of an individual, a much more recent addition to understanding of ‘ease or disease’ through our span.

Epidemiology and the concept of ‘programming’

To begin, in appropriate recent historical sequence, with human epidemiology. Numerous studies, initially in the UK and then encompassing much of the world, have demonstrated an association between lower birth weight and the subsequent development of the common cardiovascular and metabolic disorders of adult life, namely hypertension, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease deaths (Barker, 1991; Barker et al., 1993a, b; Fall et al., 1995; Yajnik et al., 1995; Curhan et al., 1996a, b; Leon et al., 1996; Lithell et al., 1996; Moore et al., 1996; Forsen et al., 1997; RichEdwards et al., 1997).