This book began by putting forward one deceptively simple question: how is contemporary Ecuadorian literature reimagining the Ecuadorian nation? I stress that this is a deceptively simple thing to ask because, while it is widely acknowledged that Latin American writing has played a historical role in imagining and reimagining what Latin American nations are or are to be, the concept of the nation has been highly questioned in the last decades. I refer to the nation not only as a cultural construct but as an organising principle for literature as well. In this light, one could argue in favour of the straightforwardness of asking how contemporary Ecuadorian writers are reimagining the nation that their predecessors and other Latin American letrados had built through narration before. Nonetheless, that question is problematised by the context from which it emerges. That is, a global scenario where thinking of nations seems to be less relevant than before. Globalisation renders national frontiers seemingly irrelevant, especially when considering that not only can books easily travel physically throughout the globe, but they can also be instantly available through the Internet. Similarly, writers rarely limit themselves to one particular territory. International circulation and translation, for instance, have opened up room for focusing on globality and World Literature, rather than placing the locus of analysis on the old-fashioned nation.

Yet the nation is hardly gone. In the late 2010s, when the research for this book was being carried out, nationalist movements in the UK, the US, Europe and Latin America either coming to power or to the forefront of national politics put in serious doubts arguments for a globalised world where nations and national limits had little if any relevance at all. Some sociologists, who have made the case to term these movements ‘neo-nationalists’, argue that their popularity in Western Europe is fuelled by voters who seek – in the old-fashioned idea of the nation – economic, social, and cultural protection from the forces of globalisation. This book dialogues with such a context of disbelief in the dismissal of the nation. However, it does so by recognising that, while the nation continues to be critically important for understanding today’s world, it needs to be thought of by factoring in the nuances of the present.