| This study addresses the role of typology in twentieth-century works of literature and film from the Americas, in Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese, that deal with the meaning of America and of American history. Existing scholarship has focused on typological thought in colonial Latin America and Puritan New England, but rarely on other periods. This project, however, explores religious and secular concepts of America by examining how twentieth-century works employ imagery, structures, and themes that can be read as typological. The works analyzed in this study have been selected based on their contributions to the larger conversation about the typologically derived concept of the Americas as a providential New World. Many of the works foreground typological representations of a new covenant between God and America; some employ types in hybridized forms that can be read through the lens of typology as tools to resist oppression.;This study examines the use of typology and hybridized types in utopian and dystopian representations of American Edens, Afro-Caribbean messianic figures, Native American counternarratives, and engagements with the concept of the posthuman. Literary texts from Brazil, Canada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, written by Euclides da Cunha, Margaret Atwood, Reinaldo Arenas, Jose Enrique Mendez Diaz, Jacques Roumain, Rene Depestre, Jose Maria Arguedas, Mario Vargas Llosa, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, are analyzed in addition to films from Canada, Mexico, and Brazil by David Cronenberg, Guillermo del Toro, and Glauber Rocha. The uses of typology and related interpretive strategies in these works provide a significant focal point from which to examine the persistence and development of religiously inflected conversations on the history and meaning of the Americas. |
