Fictions of the Bad Life

<div>The first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the prostitute in Latin American literature Claire Thora Solomon's book <i>The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature 1880-2010</i> shows the gender ethnic and racial identities that emerge in the literary figure of the prostitute during the consolidation of modern Latin American states in the late nineteenth century in the literary genre of Naturalism. Solomon first examines how legal medical and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution. She then traces the persistence of these styles themes and stereotypes about women sex ethnicity and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature with a particular emphasis on the historical fiction of prostitution and its selective reconstruction of the past.<br>  <br> <i>Fictions of the Bad Life</i> illustrates how at very different moments-the turn of the twentieth century the 1920s-30s and finally the turn of the twenty-first century-the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe the repressed colonial history they wish to change.<br></div>