“Hast seen the White Whale?” gritted Ahab in reply. “No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all,” said the other good-humoredly. “Come aboard!” “Thou are too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?” “Not enough to speak of - two islanders, that's all; - but come aboard.”Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, (chap. 115)“It warn't the grounding - that didn't keep us back but a little. We We blowed out a cylinder-head.” “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” “No'm. Killed a nigger.” “Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (chap. 32) The second of these passages, too familiar to require much commentary, is frequently instanced as a dramatic rendering of much that is noteworthy about Huckleberry Finn:The centrality to the novel's purpose of questions of racial prejudice; the transparent irony disclosed in Aunt Sally's anxious question and her genuine relief that no “people” were injured; the canniness of Huck himself, who, though perplexed by this sudden relative who calls him “Tom,”knows enough about human nature to invent yet another fictional experience and adopt yet another persona on the instant, but is totally unaware of the satire, irony, or humor of his own remark.

When Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, one of the most remarkable aspects of Whitman's idiosyncratic volume was the engraving of a daguerreotype of the poet that appeared opposite the title page (see Figure 8.1). Since the title page did not contain the author's name, the visual image stood as a kind of surrogate identification, as if the authorizing presence of the volume was more effectively represented by an illustration than by the more conventional linguistic sign. The reader was greeted with a body in print unaccompanied by a name in print.

That engraving has come to be one of the most familiar icons in American literature. Much has been written about the image - how it represented Whitman as a “common man,” a worker instead of an intellectual, a poet whose poems emerged from his body and not just his head, a person who lived outdoors (or at least who was so contemptuous of social conventions that he wore his hat indoors and would not, as he indicated in the preface to his book, take it off to signal subservience to anyone, even - and especially - the president). It was an emblem of the poet of the body more than of the poet of the soul. The image centered on the torso instead of the face, and the portrait indicated that the poetry that would emerge from such a poet would be different from what had come before - earthier and more direct and more sensual. Over the next century, the image would prove to be highly influential: It gradually worked to transform the way most American poets portrayed themselves on their book jackets and frontispieces. A growing number of poets traded their coats and ties and face portraits for a1 fresco body poses in informal clothes - poses that echoed, again and again, Whitman's originating image of the poet as literal outsider.

Literary naturalism derives mainly from a biological model. Its origin owes much to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, based in turn on his theory of natural selection. Darwin created a context that made naturalism - with its emphasis upon theories of heredity and environment - a convincing way to explain the nature of reality for the late nineteenth century. But before Darwin's ideas were available in literary form, they had to be transformed by Emile Zola in his Roman expérimental (1880). Zola, in turn, based his theories of heredity and environment on Prosper Lucas's Traité. . . de l'héredité naturelle (1850) and especially Claude Bernard's Introductionl'étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865). Zola believed that the literary imagination could make use of the ideas in these books so long as the novelist functioned like a scientist, observing nature and social data, rejecting supernatural and transhistorical explanations of the physical world, rejecting absolute standards of morality and free will, and depicting nature and human experience as a deterministic and mechanistic process. All reality could be explained by a biological understanding of matter, subject to natural laws, available in scientific terms.

General works on Latin America’s political, economic and cultural relations with the outside world, primarily with the United States and Europe, which discuss the period from the 1929 Depression to the Cuban Revolution, include Herbert Goldhamer, The Foreign Powers in Latin America (Princeton, N.J., 1972), though this important work is mostly concerned with the 1960s; Harold E. Davis and Larman C. Wilson, Latin American Foreign Policies: An Analysis (Baltimore, 1975); and G. Pope Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (1977; 2nd rev. ed., Boulder, Colo, 1989). On the foreign relations of Argentina, see Alberto A. Conil Paz and Gustavo E. Ferrari, Argentina’s Foreign Policy, 1930–1962 (South Bend, Ind., 1966). On Brazil, see Amado Luiz Cervo and Clodoaldo Bueno, História da política exterior do Brasil (São Paulo, 1992), chaps. 10 and 11. And on Mexico, see Josefina Vazquez, México y el mundo: Historia de sus relaciones exteriores, I, México y el expansionismo norteamericano; II, México, Gran Bretaña y otros países (Mexico, D.F., 1990).

The literature on Latin America’s relations with the United States is particularly extensive. Donald Dozer, Are We Good Neighbors? Three Decades of Inter-American Relations, 1930–60 (Gainesville, Fla., 1959) is a good introduction. General works with chapters on the period 1930–1960 include J. Lloyd Mecham, A Survey of United States–Latin American Relations (Boston, 1965); G. Connell-Smith, The United States and Latin America: A Historical Analysis of Inter-American Relations (New York, 1974); R. Harrison Wagner, United States Policy towards Latin America: A Study in International and Domestic Politics (Stanford, Calif, 1970); Federico G. Gil, Latin America–United States Relations (New York, 1971); Graham S. Stuart and James L. Tigner, Latin America and the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975); Lester D. Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (London, 1989); and Frank Niess, A Hemisphere to Itself: A History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (London, 1990).

The problems of preparing a bibliographical review of Latin American culture flow directly from the problems of the existing bibliographical materials themselves: fragmentary in nature, with few standard works, and many of those inaccessible. Even in literature, by far the most researched of the arts in Latin America, there are few classic histories either of the continent’s literary production as a whole or of that of individual republics. On painting and architecture, as well as music, the existing material for most periods is very sparse indeed. In addition, most works about ‘Latin American’ culture exclude Brazil. Although this review of the period 1870–1930 is intended to stand alone, the reader will also find it useful to consult essay IX:1 on the period 1820–70.

general works on cultural history

Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Historia de la cultura en la América hispánica (Mexico, D.F., 1947), trans., with a supplementary chapter, by G. Chase: A Concise History of Spanish American Culture (New York 1947), although barely more than an annotated check-list, remains the most useful of the general surveys. Also invaluable, if less objective, is G. Arciniegas, El continente de siete colores (Buenos Aires, 1965), Eng. trans. Latin America: A Cultural History (New York, 1966). S. Clissold, Latin America: A Cultural Outline (London, 1965), has appeal for the non-specialist beginner, as does J. Ocampo López, Historia de la cultura hispanoamericana, siglo XX (Bogotá, 1987), whilst J. Franco’s title, Society and the Artist: The Modern Culture of Latin America (London, 1967), has flattered a generation of readers only to deceive them, but remains a stimulating literary introduction.

Years ago, in a first attempt to describe Whitman's presence in Latin America, I said: “Studying Whitman in the poetry of Hispanic America is like searching for the footprints of a ghost that can be felt everywhere but is nowhere to be seen.”

At the University of Iowa's international meeting in homage to Whitman in 1992, once again I felt the presence of this familiar ghost. It was springtime. Observing known and unknown faces, listening to foreign accents, and deciphering allusions made with fascinating ambiguity created a certain magic among us. We were participants in a chorus that, in strange harmony, expressed the frustration of not being able to communicate all that we were saying to each other.

Then I thought that just as every generation of Whitmanists conceives a Whitman model that is characteristically related to its concept of poetic art, each culture also finds a way of translating Whitman in order to integrate him into its own conception of life.

Our Chinese colleagues explained why Whitman cannot be translated into their language in the way Westerners translate him. They gave the name of the insurmountable barrier: sex. Then I understood their long metaphorical tangents, their omissions, and their strange rhetoric. Indirectly, they were telling us that each people makes of Whitman's art an overwhelming metaphor and of his person an imposing, intricate symbol. Whitman's followers accommodate him to the size of the dream that is, in truth, his peculiar poetic art.

In spite of the apparently vast bibliography dealing with democracy in Latin America, there are many surprising gaps in the literature, particularly in terms of the development of truly comparable studies across countries and through time. The study of governmental and political institutions, which attracted attention especially among U.S. political scientists studying Latin American in the 1940s and 1950s, increasingly fell into disfavor through the 1960s and 1970s. This was a consequence initially of the sometimes excessive formalism of the earlier literature and of the onslaught of behavioralist perspectives (which did lead to many electoral studies); subsequently, it reflected the effects of dependency approaches which often viewed political processes as epiphenomenal, and then of the wave of military governments that swept through the region in the late 1960s and 1970s. With the transitions to civilian rule in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, and a concomitant revalorization of political democracy and of the importance of the study of institutions, there was a burgeoning literature on democracy in individual Latin American countries, as well as in a comparative perspective.

This essay focuses almost exclusively on comparative publications, apart from a selected list of constitutional works. Several of the social or corporate actors central to democracy, such as labour, the left and the military, receive special attention in other bibliographical essays and are barely noted here. The country-specific bibliographical essays provide references to the essential country-specific literature on such issues as the history of democracy, political parties, elections and public policy.

Most of the documentary compilations and narrative sources throw more light on the course of independence than on its origins, but some data on the latter will be found in Biblioteca de Mayo, 17 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1960–3); Archivo del General Miranda, 24 vols. (Caracas, 1929–50); Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia, 82 vols. (Caracas, 1960–6); Colección documental de la independencia del Perú, 30 vols. (Lima, 1971). Mexico and northern South America attracted the attention of a distinguished contemporary observer, Alexander von Humboldt, whose Ensayo político sobre el reino de la Nueva Espana, ed. Juan A. Ortega y Medina (Mexico, D.F., 1966), and Viaje a las regiones equinocciales del Nuevo Continente, 5 vols. (Caracas, 1956) illuminate conditions in the late colonial period. For an example of liberal economic writings in Buenos Aires, see Manuel Belgrano, Escritos económicos, ed. Gregorio Weinberg (Buenos Aires, 1954). The Spanish background has a large bibliography, of which the following is a small selection: Gonzalo Anes, El antiguo régimen: Los Borbones, 5th ed. (Madrid, 1981); Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad y estado en el siglo XVIII espanol (Madrid, 1981); John Lynch, Bourbon Spain 1700–1808 (Oxford, 1989). The Enlightenment can be studied in Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, N.J., 1958), and its impact in America in R. J. Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World (1763–1821) (Syracuse, N.Y., 1958); see also M. L. Pérez Marchand, Dos etapas ideológicas del siglo XVIII en México a través de los papeles de la Inquisición (Mexico, D.F., 1945).

argentina

The bibliography of nineteenth-century Argentina can be approached through Joseph R. Barager, ‘The historiography of the Río de la Plata area since 1930’, HAHR, 39 (1959), 588–642, and James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation (New York, 1964), 248–74. A more specialised work is Julio O. Chiappini Bibliografia sobre Rosas (Rosario, 1973).

Public documents are reproduced in a number of collections. The formal policy reviews of the executive are given in H. Mabragaña, Los Mensajes, 1810–1910, 6 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1910); for the governors of Buenos Aires a better version is provided by Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Mensajes de los gobernadores de la provincia de Buenos Aires 1822–1849, 2 vols. (La Plata, 1976). Basic legislative, constitutional and inter-provincial texts are to be found in Emilio Ravignani (ed.), Asambleas constituyentes argentinas, 6 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1937–9). The main documentation concerning Rosas is that of Adolfo Saldías (ed.), Papeles de Rosas, 2 vols. (La Plata, 1904–7), which can be supplemented by two convenient compilations of his thought and policy, Andrés M. Carretero, El pensamiento político de juan M. de Rosas (Buenos Aires, 1970) and Arturo Enrique Sampay, Las ideas políticas de Juan Manuel de Rosas (Buenos Aires, 1972), and by a further collection of his correspondence, Juan Carlos Nicolau, ed., Correspondencia inédita entrejuan Manuel de Rosas y Manuel José García (Tandil, 1989). Aspects of the opposition to Rosas are documented in Gregorio F. Rodríguez (ed.), Contribución histórica y documental, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1921–2), and Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La campana libertadora del general Lavalle (1838–1842 (La Plata, 1944)

Two broad interpretive studies of Brazilian history that give prominent attention to the political circumstances of mid-century are Raymundo Faoro, Os donos do poder, 2nd ed. (Porto Alegre and São Paulo, 1975), and Florestan Fernandes, A revolução burguesa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1975). Both are concerned with tracing the connection between social structure and political institutions and events. Both are heavily influenced by Weberian typologies, although Fernandes also includes a certain amount of Marxist thought in his scheme. Faoro stresses the emergence of a strong state bureaucracy allegedly victorious over the landed class, while Fernandes sees the seigneurial, supposedly status-oriented slave owners as dominating the state. Less ambitious and more mechanically Marxist is Nelson Werneck Sodré, História da burguesia brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1964). Caio Prado Júnior’s História econômica do Brasil, 5th ed. (São Paulo, 1959), is not so rigid as is Sodré in the economic interpretation of society and politics, but gives less attention to the nineteenth century. His Evolução política do Brasil (São Paulo, 1957) stresses the struggle between merchants and landowners for control of the state.

The first historian of the Empire, who still exerts great influence on our understanding of the period, was Joaquim Nabuco, whose biography of his father, Um estadista do império, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1975), first published in 1897–1900, dealt chronologically with politicians and political events without neglecting the larger social setting within which they acted. Nabuco’s conservative, pro-imperial point of view can be contrasted with the critical stance adopted in 1909 by Euclides da Cunha in A margem da história, 2nd ed. (Oporto, 1913); da Cunha felt much more clearly than Nabuco the Empire’s failure to change.

In English the best general account of Bolivian politics since the revolution of 1952 is James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–82 (London, 1984). James M. Malloy and Eduardo Gamarra, Revolution and Reaction: Bolivia, 1964–85 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988) is also worth reading. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn (eds.), Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1971) contains a number of essays that are still of value. To a lesser extent it is also worth consulting Jerry R. Ladman’s edited collection, Modern-Day Bolivia: A Legacy of the Revolution and Prospects for the Future (Tempe, Ariz., 1982). A standard source for the pre-revolutionary period is Herbert S. Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Cambridge, Eng., 1969), which is strong on the 1930s, but peters out thereafter. His more recent survey, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (Oxford, 1982) pays due attention to the 1940–80 period, although without really vindicating its curious sub-title. J. Valerie Fifer, Bolivia: Land, Location, and Politics since 1825 (Cambridge, Eng., 1972) gives useful background on the Chaco, but does not develop the implications of Bolivia’s location for the postwar period. Other relevant books in English include Christopher Mitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia: From the MNR to Military Rule (New York, 1977); Jerry W. Knudson, Bolivia: Press and Revolution 1932–64 (Lanham, Md., 1986), which contains many nuggets of information, although the analysis is not very sophisticated; Charles F. Geddes, Patino: The Tin King (London, 1972) from a pro-company standpoint.

In spite of a great quantity of recent literature the history of Spanish and Spanish American oceanic navigation and trade before 1720 is very uneven in its availability and level of sophistication. Some aspects, eras and episodes are well known; others, such as the connections between certain specific areas and the carrera, have been studied hardly at all. Yet others, such as the dimensions and significance of smuggling, can never be known accurately. The subject has also suffered from a tug-of-war between romance and statistics. Some writers have emphasized treasure, pirates, hurricanes, galleons and derring-do on the Spanish Main. The other school has counted the ships, the crews, the crossings, the prices, the cargoes, until the graphs and tables reduce the whole epic to banality.

The literature on the expansion of Europe is immense and there are many approaches. One of the most imaginative and comprehensive surveys is Pierre Chaunu, L’expansion européenne du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1969), a fine example of the author’s emphasis on economics and geography. Another general survey, more closely tied to men and events, is Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952). Carlo Cipolla in his entertaining Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York, 1966), summarizes what we know about the role of material advantages in Europe’s advance overseas. John H. Parry, Europe and a Wider World, 1415–1715 (London, 1959), explains early routes, ships, navigation and trade.

A review of popular music literature, of centres and research collections, and future research on popular music is provided in Gerard Béhague ‘Popular music’ in Handbook of Latin American Popular Culture, edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr. and Charles M. Tatum (Westport, Conn., 1985), 3–38. Vol. 6/2 (1987) of the journal Popular Music is dedicated to Latin America and includes a section on ‘sources and resources.’ Jan Fairley tated bibliography of Latin American popular music with particular references to Chile and nueva canción’, Popular Music, 5 (1985), 305–56. John Schechter provides a good discussion and selected bibliography on popular music in his article ‘The current state of bibliographic research in Latin American ethnomusicology’, in Dan C. Hazen (ed.), Latin American Masses and Minorities: Their Images and Realities, 2 vols. (Madison, Wise, 1987). For an assessment of studies of Latin American folk and traditional music, see Gerard Behague, ‘Latin America’, in Helen Myers (ed.), Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (London, 1993).

Gilbert Chase, A Guide to the Music of Latin America (1955; 2nd ed., Washington, D.C., 1962), remains valuable. For bibliographic references since c. 1960, the music section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies should be consulted. Gerard Béhague’s detailed survey of Latin American art music, Music in Latin America: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1979; Sp. trans., Caracas, 1983), provides copious bibliographical notes on twentieth-century music. Trends, stylistic development and detailed and updated biographical information concerning Latin American music, musicians and institutions are provided in the twenty volumes of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie (London, 1980).

The historiography and social science literature on the Catholic church in Latin America since 1930 is large and unsatisfactory. There are two main reasons why it is unsatisfactory. First, most ecclesiastical archives, especially that of the Vatican, remain closed to scholars for this period. Secondly, most of the publications on the subject since the late 1960s have been written from the partisan perspectives of the Catholic Left and Catholic Right. From these have emerged two orthodoxies: the one perceiving the diffusion of a ‘theology of liberation’ as a radical break with five gloomy centuries of overidentification of the Roman Catholic church in Latin America with encrusted and oppressive power structures; the other, with equal rigidity, seeing the changes of the 1960s and 1970s as posing a grotesque challenge from within to the creative traditions of five centuries of self-abnegating missionary activity. Both of these orthodoxies are highly critical in tone; neither is self-critical in spirit. Few attempts have been made to examine the cumulative significance of the sequence of small changes in the church between 1930 and the early 1960s. No serious attempt has been made to challenge the assumption that a major transformation occurred in the church in the 1960s and 1970s, or, if it occurred, to identify and quantify in how many parishes and among how many Catholics it had a profound impact.

Few political institutions or social groups in Latin America have attracted as much sustained scholarly interest as the military. The corpus of academic literature consists mainly of studies of institutional, behavioural and cultural aspects of the armed forces as political actors. To a lesser extent, the corpus also contains institutional military histories as well as sociological studies of the military organizations as social groups.

The focus of this bibliographical essay is primarily on academic literature dealing with the domestic political role of Latin American military establishments. Conventional military histories that deal with the military institutions exclusively in their military personae - the Chaco War, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, and, more significantly, the Falklands/Malvinas War - are not included. Also excluded are the institutional histories and biographies officially sanctioned by the various military establishments themselves. Official military publications and in-house journals comprise a corpus of literature quite distinct from academic studies. For a superb academic analysis of the official corpus of military literature in Latin America and elsewhere, see Frederick M. Nunn, The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism in World Perspective (Lincoln, Nebr., 1992). This exclusion, however, does not cover books written by military personnel in their individual capacity, such as academic works and autobiographies.

Only months before she died in a freak automobile accident in Nice, France, in 1927, strangled by the same scarf with which she danced the impassioned Marseillaise, Isadora Duncan completed her autobiography, My Life. Twenty-five years after catapulting to international acclaim as the “barefoot dancer” from California, Duncan proclaimed the poet Walt Whitman one of her three “dance masters.” With the bravado typical of her after-concert lectures, she hailed Whitman as the “supreme poet of our country”and credited his poetry with having instilled in her “my great spiritual realization of life” (Duncan, My Life, 31, 341). To many of those who had followed the progress of her dance across three continents and nearly as many decades, Duncan's disclosure only confirmed what they had long since determined for themselves. Writer and editor Max Eastman was among those who perceived in Duncan's dance a strong Whitmanic presence. In his memoirs, Eastman extolled “that warm witty magnetism” with which she danced, terming her “not only a supreme artist. . . [but] also a creative and a moral force.” For him as for others of his generation, “[s]he really became, as she thought to, a winged apostle to the whole world of Walt Whitman's vision of a poised and free-bodied and free-souled humanity, carrying his thought to hearts that never heard of him.”