Argentine Literature continues to figure prominently in Spanish and Modern Languages programs in the English-speaking world, and there are specialists in Argentine literature in most departments in the United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. If we peruse the anthologies commonly used for survey courses, and the requirements for graduate degrees, we will find Argentine literature overrepresented. Certain authors are also regularly taught in English and Comparative Literature departments, and in large survey classes in World Literatures, Third World Literatures, and Gender Studies. This continued interest within and outside foreign language departments, and the recent boom in translation of Argentine works, provides fertile ground for this volume.
A History of Argentine Literature seeks to be the book of record for years to come. We propose a major reimagining of the field of Argentine literature, situating it within current debates in World Literatures, Gender, LGBQT+ identifications, Ecocriticism, Migration and Memory Studies. While the chapters predominantly address texts in Spanish, we also pay heed to other languages that figure in Argentine culture, such as English, French, German, Guaraní, Italian, Quechua, and Yiddish. Our view is both panoramic in scope and incisive in its in-depth studies of authors, works, and theoretical problems. Our volume builds on available scholarship on canonical works but opens up the field to include a more diverse rendering as well as engaging with the full spectrum of textual interventions from travel writing to drama and popular gauchesca to celebrated avant-garde works. Ultimately, through these novel readings of Argentine literature we do not seek to provide a comprehensive account but rather to inspire new knowledge and exploration.
A New History of Argentine Literature: Three Beginnings
The first history of Argentine literature, the five volume Historia de la literatura argentina (1917–23) written by Ricardo Rojas, systematized the field for the first time. Almost a century later, the ambitious collective twelve-volume Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, edited by Noé Jitrik, revised and actualized that foundational project. In the anglophone academy, Argentine literature has been conceptualized mainly through the personal visions of critics such as Ricardo Piglia, Josefina Ludmer, Adolfo Prieto, Sylvia Molloy, and Beatriz Sarlo. A History of Argentine Literature updates the field by offering contemporary perspectives that heed studies that are in dialogue with key critical readings of Argentine literature, such as those of David Viñas in Argentina and Francine Masiello in the United States.
A history of literature is always a way of organizing a story, of giving it a starting point that guides its subsequent organization until it reaches the present. It is also a way of highlighting a certain sequence of episodes, texts, figures that define a possible relationship between history and literature; between chronology, texts, and practices. In this volume we propose a reading that takes into account existing histories but goes beyond that by presenting a plurilingual and diverse literature.
In our rendering, Argentine literature has three possible beginnings that can be accounted for using three dates: 1536, 1810, and 1837. Each beginning advances an idea of literature, a type of relationship with history, and a sequence of events that culminate in the contemporary cultural scene. The first beginning takes into account the opening texts written since the sixteenth century in the territory that would be identified as the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776. The foundational text in this reading is Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias, written in German by the soldier Ulrico Schmidl on his return to Europe from the 1536 expedition that carried out the failed first foundation of Buenos Aires. This text, published for the first time in 1567, was translated into Spanish centuries later, and thus its key place in the history of Argentine literature was established retrospectively by critics who read it alongside a variety of colonial texts that included tales of conquest, travel writing, narrative and lyric poetry, plays, publications in the incipient periodic press, and some poems written by criollos using the voice of the gauchos. If we take 1536 as a starting point, Argentine literature therefore is plurinational and multilingual, and it includes the works of scribes, authors, amanuenses, editors, translators; most of them Europeans of different origins, but also criollos, mestizos, and Indians. Although these texts do not quite make up a strong colonial literary tradition, as in other regions of Hispanic America, they do allow us to notice some persistent tensions and confrontations that can be identified in the second possible beginning of Argentine literature, in 1810. The particular colonial situation of the River Plate area, far away from the central administration of the empire, contributed both to the instability of conditions of enunciation and to the fragility of distribution of texts marked by censorship and smuggling. These instabilities reveal the class and racial tensions that determined unequal access to reading and writing, and to access to texts. Some of these issues were at the heart of the revolutionary process that marked the end of Spanish rule, and a possible second beginning for Argentine literature.
We date the second beginning of Argentine literature in the May Revolution of 1810 that initiates the process of independence from Spain. In this rendering, literature is part of a political starting point since for the revolutionary patriots everything had to be created anew. The various textual productions of the lettered elites during this period encompasses textual accounts that accompany the political practices of the moment, such as speeches and proclamations, newspaper articles, historical sketches that will serve as a reference for future historiography, and personal memories, often published posthumously. Although only some writings within these categories can be recognized as strictly literary, almost all serve to mark the inaugural moment of lettered culture in the River Plate area and the connection between literature and politics, which will be dominant until the last quarter of the nineteenth century and which will resurface in key circumstances of Argentine literary history throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This connection, between politics and writing, delays both the constitution of a differentiated literary production and the emergence of the figure of the writer. The predominance of politics also defines the mostly prescriptive and pedagogical function of the discursive production of the moment, as well as the relationship between the literate elite and the people it wanted to educate. During this period a different type of discursive production, produced by a rural subaltern population, proliferates in the form of oral and anonymous popular patriotic poetry, which will soon be compiled, reorganized, and turned into text by Bartolomé Hidalgo in a particular form of song called cielitos. In Hidalgo’s cielitos, we observe an emerging connection between popular and high literature that lives on in Argentine literature today.
After the end of the wars of independence, internal strife impeded the modernizing projects of men of letters and science who arrived from Europe in the 1820s. Their influence, however, can be observed in different ways, such as the growing presence of books and the increasing cultural sociability of the Buenos Aires elite, including literary salons hosted by women. Political emancipation did not include an effort to achieve cultural emancipation from Europe, and Argentine literature would continue to look to Europe, and especially to France, for inspiration and validation well into the twentieth century. Ethnic and class inequalities in access to rights to reading and writing persisted as well as radical gender differences, even while the education of women became a topic of the time. In the midst of a cultural situation where literature was increasingly tied to politics, and where men of letters were further and further away from the people with whom they and their political programs were concerned, conditions emerged for a group of lettered men to attribute to themselves the foundation of a national literature: the so-called 1837 generation.
Eighteen thirty-seven is an emblematic date in Argentine literature since it was chosen as a generational mark by a group of young men who regularly gathered to share writings and discuss ideas about the future of the nation. For the first time, literary production was considered a foundational act with a national dimension. Romanticism, imported from Europe, provided a baggage of notions (creation, originality, style, local color) and a repertoire of motifs (landscape, types, language) linked to the particular and the local, which showed the value of the new and the proper in the constitution of a national literature. If this third beginning is definitive then it is because it responded to an expression of will and managed to build a national literary tradition. Writers experimented with all genres, with uneven results. Privileged genres included poetry and essays of ideas, but the young men of 1837 also wrote travel narratives as well as sentimental, historical, and political novels. It can be said that almost everything that was written thereafter dialogues, in one way or another, with the ideas and writings of those years. In 1837, Echeverría published “La cautiva” (“The Captive Woman”), the extensive narrative poem written in octasyllablic verses in which he coined the landscape of the “desert,” the home of the Indians, a source of fear and anxiety for the literate elites, but also a space to project the yearning for possession and wealth.
The Romantics sought to answer the question of how to constitute the desired nation in various ways. Meanwhile, their confrontation with the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who would remain in power until 1852, forced them into exile. Among their number was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a young man from the Andes who had gained full prominence in 1845 with the publication of Facundo, an original essay of national interpretation that would become a Latin American classic. In Facundo, written during his Chilean exile, Sarmiento delivers one of the most effective and controversial formulas to explain Argentina and Latin America: the confrontation between civilization and barbarism. In his model of the nation, the gaucho was an obstacle to modernization that had to be overcome through labor and education but also through economic and territorial intervention. The series of political, cultural, and social oppositions presented by Sarmiento also had a literary component: he encouraged the writing of novels with rural protagonists that exemplified the struggle of civilization against barbarism.
If there was no place for the gaucho in Sarmiento’s model, literature would find him a home with the publication in 1872 of the gauchesca poem Martín Fierro – a surprising and unexpected success, it sold thousands of copies and would become the undisputed national classic for the Centennial, as it continues to be to this day. These paradoxes, the prowess of the ideas that engender them, and the tensions between literature and its contexts of enunciation are at the heart of this history of Argentine literature.
Organization of the Volume
A History of Argentine Literature is divided into three parts that cover the whole span of Argentine literature, from the earliest colonial writings to the most diverse contemporary literary practices. The criteria used for its organization combine approaches focused on moments, figures, and significant works with critical perspectives that address median and long-ranging problematics and phenomena. We offer new readings of the canon as well as studies that broaden it. The sections and chapters address historical, political, and cultural aspects as well as contextual circumstances. We place Argentine literature and its texts in both a local and a transnational context. We have taken into account approaches, conditions of writing and publication, circulation of texts and authors, intermediality, and the creation of publics for both men and women writers. In this sense, our volume starts a dialogue between the textual and its cultural, social, political, and economic underpinning, hence making this history of Argentine literature also a history of Argentine culture told from the point of view of the literary.
The first part – “Literary Dates” – offers a chronological account of the Argentine literary tradition through an emphasis on nodal points. Chapters in this section reconstruct the literary field in which these texts were created, produced, and published as well as the connections between literature and other media. The historical, social, and political underpinnings of the period are taken into account in each case. The first three chapters are devoted to what we consider the three beginnings of Argentine literature: 1536, 1810, and 1837. We then move to 1884, a year when essential novels that define the genre are published, and when a specific Argentine literary field comes into being; the chapter on 1910 addresses the celebrations of the centenary of independence, the inception of a moment in which different literary events and publications allow for a revision of the relationships between literature and the state. Nineteen ten, the inaugural chapter of the twentieth century, marks a new outlook on literature and culture firmly grounded in a consolidated nation. The chapter devoted to 1926 looks at the professionalization of the literary field, and at the thematic and narrative lines of modern Argentine literature. The conflation between the literary and the political, inexorable in the nineteenth century, becomes more and more critical and nuanced in the twentieth. In all the dates selected, there is a deep connection between the literary and the political and a complex network of factors is revealed: cases in point are Peronism and its antagonists in the chapter devoted to 1948, the so-called Latin American boom for 1963, and censorship and exile in the chapter on 1980. Our last date—2001—describes the aftermath of one of the most devastating economic crises, but also the creative modes of reinvention and cultural creation whose persistence is still fertile in the most contemporary of Argentine literary production.
Part II, “Critical Inroads,” is organized around central theoretical interrogations. Each chapter proposes a trajectory that articulates a particular problematic with the cultural issues that configured and accounted for it. We investigate topics such as the consolidation of the press at the turn of the twentieth century; criollismo and its negotiations of the relationships between lettered, popular, and mass cultures; the relationship between literature and science and its contribution to the design of hegemonic imaginaries around race and gender; and alternative renderings of time, and space. The critical itineraries in Part II also explore transnational cultural exchanges, the global circulation of texts and authors, definitions of identity (national, regional, linguistic), and constructions of gender and dissidence. Further, this section accounts for different notions of the textual – including tango, opera, rock, and performance – privileged discourses in which to revisit relationships between orality and writing, voice and body.
“Literary Names,” the third part of our volume, brings together a set of authors and works from different historical periods and showcases diverse iterations of the literary. Each chapter provides close readings of literary works, and zooms in on poetics, practices, and contexts. These studies investigate particular texts and authors, and establish connections with other zones of the cultural field, thus designing paths for further critical readings.
Finally, all translations for Spanish sources are by chapter authors unless otherwise noted.
A History of Argentine Literature comes together through the connections and insightful readings of a group of scholars at different stages in their careers who work at the crossroads of disciplines, languages, and critical traditions. We draw on the wealth of Argentine cultural production, and on the vibrancy and enduring promise of literature.
