In a 2006 article analysing the state of affairs of Ecuadorian literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Carlos Arcos argues that Ecuadorian society changed more radically in the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s than it had changed in the previous two centuries. In his view, this transformation was to result in the emergence of a different kind of Ecuadorian literature. That is, a new type of writing that would emerge from – and engage with – the breakdown of social paradigms, the shattering of collective expectations in the social order and the scattering of Ecuadorian society around the globe that followed the hectic 1990s:

So far, I have argued that the changes Arcos points out find their origins in the Feriado Bancario, a watershed experience that this book deems essential for understanding contemporary Ecuador. My proposal in the previous chapter rests on the idea that contemporary Ecuadorian literature has emerged to meet the challenges that post-crisis Ecuadorian society presents. In doing so, authors such as Leonardo Valencia, Gabriela Alemán and Carlos Arcos create fictions that reflect and engage with the transnational experiences that have become part of the fabric of twenty-first century Ecuador.

As fiction that navigates national boundaries, contemporary Ecuadorian literature not only reimagines Ecuador. By transgressing and redefining frontiers, it also dialogues with a wider issue: through novels such as the ones analysed in the previous chapter, which are informed by transnationality and help us to see Ecuador as a transnational space, contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with and challenges a broader discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks for understanding and reading literature. This discussion, as I seek to demonstrate in the next pages, relates not only to the Latin American context but also to a ‘global’ domain: that is, to World Literature.