Paramo. Other dimensions had already been created byjorge Luis Borges LITERATURE in his Ficciones ^1944), and byAlejo Carpentier in Los Reinos de Este Mundo (1949). Together they set up a new narrative kindling the mythic and metaphysical imagination, allowing a probe into the ambiguities present in the continental man. In the nineteenth century, given the local nature of the struggle for independence, the Latin American novel operated within a closed circuit. For instance, neither the Paris-Commune nor other external events (like the Franco-Prussian war) had a bearing on the living experience of the writer or people in general. On the other hand, the post-First World War scene was- different. The economic order began to get internationalized and increased intra-national interaction. The Spanish Philosopher, Ortega YGasset, whose idea of self-assessment of Spanish society served as an influential model for Latin Americans, laid the basis for the task of self-appraisal. After the Spanish Civil War many exiled Spanish intellectuals came over to Latin America with fresh ideas. Personal observation and interpretation of reality began replacing preconceived patterns. The European literary movements that succeed one another with such velocity touched the Latin American artist's sensibility. Joyce and Faulkner immediately incorporated as part of the universal experience of writers. The activity of writing now involved elements of a game, and the writer tried to create new possibilities which transcend the visible yet define the future on the ground of reality. At the basis of this resurgence lay his deep concern for stylistic inventiveness, which may encompass social contradictions coming in the wake of the technological revolution and the rise of the city centres which relegate the rurall landscape to the periphery. In novels the accent on personal interpretations reflected in the narrative mode of different authors, specifically, in the search for the relationship between fantasy and reality where myth, epic (real deeds.) and Utopia are interplayed to form the image of reality. In the shaping of this image the lineal determinism of time is broken by a circular con-^ cept revealing the simultaneous spaces of reality - the past and present running together. Only a language that can sustain the tension between nostalgia and hope is capable of inventing this image. Here then is a new kind ofbarpque that revolves round the impulse of emancipation through language. But most novelists attempted this with their own specificities and it would be incorrect to characterize them as having what Jose Marti called anapparenfair of family" in the sense in which this was true for the novelists of the earlier generation. Journal of Arts and Ideas 55