Our warmest congratulations to Elidio La Torre Lagares (University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras) whose book Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space is now available from Routledge!
Description: Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space (Routledge, 2026), the newly released volume by writer and critic Elidio La Torre Lagares, introduces a paradigmatic and methodologically disruptive intervention in contemporary novel studies. Positioned among a new generation of scholars reshaping the field, La Torre Lagares offers a work that transforms the Caribbean from a site traditionally framed as the object of literary scrutiny into a theoretical and epistemic crucible—one whose semiotic density, historical sedimentations, and archipelagic infrastructures recalibrate the terms of global narratological discourse.
At the core of the work is hyperglossia: a Caribbean-born narratological threshold that accounts for linguistic overflow not as ornament or digression but as structural engine. The volume reconceptualizes textual excess as a mechanism of spatial production, cognitive adhesion, and epistemic drift—reframing how the novel formats reality even under conditions of discursive saturation, platform regulation, and narrative nonlocality.
Hyperglossia and the Novel, part of the Routledge Studies on Latin American and Iberian Literature, advances novel studies by proposing a reconfiguration of polyphony that moves beyond the comfort of harmonized voices and into a field shaped by interruption, asynchronous meaning, and an ontology unsettled by the continual overflow of signs. Space itself becomes theorized through this excess, as the work extends Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia into a more expansive semiotic terrain—one that enfolds visuality, patterns of data circulation, and the cognitive self as it is shaped and re-shaped by narrative infrastructures.
Within this expanded field, the dispositif is reassembled: narrative appears at once as an elusive hyperobject—too vast to be contained—and as a functional apparatus, operating in tension with the systems that monitor, rank, and route meaning while never delivering closure. The project also places opacity at its methodological core, drawing on Glissant’s archipelagic thought to show how narrative resists totalization through modes of relation and semiotic emergence rooted in Caribbean epistemologies.
Out of this constellation arises a scalable narratology, capable of moving across disciplines and institutions, offering a set of conceptual tools through which the spatial and ideological architectures of the novel can be read within ecological, colonial, and digital contexts.
The work includes sustained readings of major maximalist contributions to the modern and post-narrative novel, including Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove and Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana. Through these readings, the book argues that linguistic excess and spatial collapse in contemporary fiction are not aberrations but world-producing features that scholars must now read, reckon, and respond to.
Hyperglossia and the Novel does not merely broaden the conceptual vocabulary of novel studies—it alters its topography. Its theoretical legacy does not branch along a continental line but disperses like currents across islands, diasporas, code, and sea. The region that once anchored stories now anchors theory.
Elidio La Torre Lagares, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, bridges Caribbean textual experimentation, narratology, dispositif theory, and transmedial forms. The author recently received the Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Award medal for his book Aguacerando. Last year, he was a finalist for the Octavio Paz Poetry Award with his book Derecho al Olvido. He serves as founder of the MFA in Creative Writing program at UPR and has presented extensively at international literary and academic conferences.
For purchasing information, see https://www.routledge.com/Hyperglossia-and-the-Novel-The-Production-of-Non-Space/Lagares/p/book/9781032976228
Our warmest congratulations to Elidio La Torre Lagares (University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras) whose book Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space is now available from Routledge! Description: Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space (Routledge, 2026), the newly released volume by writer and critic Elidio La Torre Lagares, introduces a
