Argentine literature is among the most important in Spanish language, with world-famous writers such as Jose Hernandez, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Manuel Puig, Joaquin Gomez Bas and Ernesto Sabato. Like other aspects of the Argentine culture, literature in Argentina has always been subject to heavy European influence, especially from Spain and France.

History

Origins

Argentine literature began around the year 1550, with Matias Rojas de Oquendo and Pedro Gonzalez de Prado (from Santiago del Estero, the first important urban settlement in Argentina), who wrote both prose and poetry. They were partly inspired, undoubtedly, in the unwritten aboriginal poetry, according to Carlos Abregu Vyrreira by the lules, juries, diaguitas and tonocotes. A symbiosis emerged slowly between the aboriginal and Spanish traditions, creating a distinct literature, which was geographically limited (well into the 18th century) to the Argentine north and the central region, with the province of Cordoba as its center. Two names stand out from this period: Gaspar Juarez Baviano and Antonia de la Paz y Figueroa, also known as "Beata Antula". Within poetry, Luis de Tejeda, disciple of Gongora and Saint John of the Cross, is considered to be the first Argentine poet.

Gradually, with the economic prosperity of the port, the cultural axis moved eastward. The letters of the colonial age (Viceroyalty-neoclassicism, baroque and epic) grew under the protection of the independentist fervor: Vicente Lopez y Planes, Pantaleon Rivarola and Esteban de Luca.

Cultural independence from Spain

The rupture with Spanish tradition, in favor of the French romanticism that postulated the return to popular sources and to the medieval past, allowed Esteban Echeverria to be the creator of the first local and realistic story, El Matadero ("The slaughterhouse"), and of the poem La Cautiva ("The Captive"), with the Pampas as its stage.

In the middle of the 19th century Jose Marmol published the first Argentine novel, Amalia. Meanwhile poetry decreased its combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental: Carlos Guido y Spano and Ricardo Gutierrez, the chronicle writers of folk literature; Vicente Fidel Lopez, Lucio V. Mansilla and Juana Manuela Gorriti; and the historical ones: Bartolome Mitre and Domingo F. Sarmiento.

Generation of 1880

The generation of 1880 emphasized the European color and the cultural supremacy of Buenos Aires. The migratory current of mixed ethnicity accentuated the change of the big village for the cosmopolitan metropolis. The poetry of this period is lyric: Leopoldo Diaz y Almafuerte. Essay is a recent genre: Jose Manuel Estrada, Pedro Goyena and Joaquin V. Gonzalez. The narrative works oscillated between social issues and folk literature: Miguel Cane, Eugenio Cambaceres, Julian Martel y Carlos Maria Ocantos.

Literatura Gauchesca

While European-oriented, indeed Eurocentric, themes and styles were and would remain the norm in Argentine letters, especially from Buenos Aires, a picturesque, imitation-gaucho literature, purporting to use the language of the gauchos and reflect their mentality, arose in the 1880s as a part of that Generation's understanding of national identity. The three great figures in this trend, Jose Hernandez, Estanislao del Campo and Hilario Ascasubi immediately became, and have remained, among the most popular figures of a whole unique genre in Argentine and Uruguayan literature, the gauchesco or "gauchoesque" style. (Cf: Borges: Aspectos de la poesia gauchesca, 1950).

Modern

Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, led by the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, modernism appears. Preciosity of manner and the influence of Symbolism sum up the new esthetic, which inspires the clearest voice in poetry, Leopoldo Lugones, author among many other things, of the first Argentine science fiction story.

The first truly modern generation in Argentine literature is that of the Martinfierristas (c. 1922). The movement contributes an intellectual doctrine in which current representative paths come together: that of Florida group, adscript to ultraismo, with Oliverio Girondo, Jorge Luis Borges, Leopoldo Marechal and Macedonio Fernandez; and that of Boedo, impressed by Russian realism, with Raul Gonzalez Tunon, Cesar Tiempo y Elias Catelnuovo. Of all of them, Ricardo Guiraldes remains classic in style, giving a whole new freshness to gauchesca poetry and writing perhaps the great Argentine novel, Don Segundo Sombra.

Benito Lynch (1885-1951), a wonderfully excentric short-story writer who, like Guiraldes, does not easily fit into any tiresome "generation", proposed his marvelously quirky tales in an enchanted new-gauchoesque manner about this time.

Between the end of this decade and the beginning of the following one emerged the Novisimos ("Newest"), a generation of poets (Arturo Cambours Ocampo, Carlos Carlino and Jose Portogalo), as well as narrators (Arturo Cerretani, Roberto Arlt, Luis Maria Albamonte and Luis Horacio Velazquez) and playwrights (Roberto Valenti, Juan Oscar Ponferrada and Javier Villafane). This group postulates philosophical reflection and a new essence for Argentinidad.

Generation of '37

The Generation of 1937 centres perhaps on poetry, where it develops the descriptive, the nostalgic and the meditative with Ricardo E. Molinari, Vicente Barbieri, Olga Orozco, Leon Benaros and Alfonso Sola Gonzales. Narrators line up after idealism and magic realism, (Maria Granata, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortazar) or a subtler form of realism Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ernesto L. Castro, Ernesto Sabato and Abelardo Arias), with some urban touches as well as folk literature (Joaquin Gomez Bas and Roger Pla).

Essayists do not abound: Antonio Pages Larraya, Emilio Carilla, Luis Soler Canas; but, of course, the greatest Argentine essayist after Sarmiento, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, belongs to the Generation of '37.

Neohumanism, Existentialism and other influences

About 1950 another milestone arises: the New Humanism, a response to World War II and its aftermath. On one level are avant-gardists like Raul Gustavo Aguirre, Edgar Bayley and Julio Llinas; on another, existentialists: Jose Isaacson, Julio Aristides and Miguel Angel Viola. Further away, those who reconcile both tendencies with a regionalist basis: Alfredo Veirave, Jaime Davalos and Alejandro Nicotra. Among narrators we find charged testimonies of the times: Beatriz Guido, David Vinas and Marco Denevi. In a majority of these writers, a strong influence of Anglo-Saxon and Italian poetry can be perceived.

A new trend starts in 1960, going till about to 1990 . Influences are heterogeneous: Sartre, Camus, Eluard; some Spanish writers, like Camilo Jose Cela; and Argentines like Borges, Arlt, Cortazar and Marechal. Two tendencies can be seen: the tracing of metaphysical time and historicity (Horacio Salas, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ramon Plaza) and urban and social disarray: (Abelardo Castillo, Marta Lynch, Manuel Puig, Alicia Steinberg).

From the provinces important poets and storytellers appear: Luis Franco, Juan L. Ortiz and Jorge Washington Abalos.

Dark military days

The 1970s are dark for the intellectual creation. The sign of the epoch is exile (Juan Gelman, Antonio Di Benedetto) or death (Roberto Santoro, Haroldo Conti, Rodolfo Walsh). Remaining literary journalists like Liliana Heker veiled their opinions in their work. Some journalists (Rodolfo Walsh), poets (Agustin Tavitian, Antonio Aliberti), narrators (Osvaldo Soriano, Fernando Sorrentino), and essayists (Ricardo Herrera, Maria Rosa Lojo) stand out between the vicissitudes and renew the field of the ethical and aesthetic ideas. Again the referents are Eluard, Eliot, Montale and Neruda.

Current

The 1990s are marked by the reunion of the survivors of different generations, in an intellectual coalition for the review of values and texts facing the end of the century.

Miscellanea

Ernesto Che Guevara was an Argentine, born in Rosario. Besides his armed fight and his political involvement with Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, he wrote The Motorcycle Diaries, about his travels around Argentina and South America, which was turned recently into a movie.

Other pages about Argentine literature

-Argentine literature -Borges on Martin Fierro -Cronopio -Facundo -Florida group -Gaucho literature -Martin Fierro -Martin Fierro (magazine) -Misteriosa Buenos Aires -Sur (magazine) -The Motorcycle Diaries

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Argentine_literature

Argentine literature