Argentine literature

The literature of Argentina since independence in 1816. The first Latin American territory to revolt against Spain, in 1810, Argentina developed a distinct literary tradition in which Romanticism was energized by imaginative responsiveness to the empty loneliness of the pampas and by liberal resentment of the ruralist dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas (died 1852), often equated with barbarism.

Important early writers include the politically disaffected poet Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851) and José Mármol (1817–1871), author of the melodramatic romantic novel Amalia (1851). The gaucho or nomadic cattleman, resented by progressive critics of Rosas' pastoral vision of Argentina, was transformed by the industrialization that spelled his extinction into a tragically romantic figure, as in Martín Fierro 1872–79 by José Hernández (1834–1886). This in turn influenced novels of idealized gaucho adventure and coming of age such as Don Segundo Sombra (1926) by Ricardo Güiraldes and contributed to the 20th-century literary obsession with Argentine identity, heroism, and masculinity or machismo in works such as the epic quest-novel Adán Buenosayres (1948) by Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970) and the psychological or philosophical fictions of Ernesto Sábato (1911– ) and Eduardo Mallea (1903– ).

Poets such as Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938) registered modernist reactions against romantic and realist convention, influenced by the French avant-garde while retaining distinctively Argentine settings and national concerns. In politically troubled modern Argentina, cosmopolitan and often apolitical experimental and modernist writing, typified by the influential fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar (1916–1984), has provoked neo-realist or socialist reactions in the work of Manuel Puig (1932–1990) and the committed Marxist novelist David Viñas (1929– ).