Published during the debates around the role of the author in response to the Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Latin American literary Boom, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966) emerges not only as a culmination of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction but also as a volume in dialogue with the literary, social, and political concerns of the time. Constant throughout this collection is the representation of characters who are displaced from familiar surroundings either physically, psychologically, or even fantastically. Characters are forced to share an uncomfortable space in “Autopista del Sur,” a story situated on the highway south of Paris that presents an allegory of human relations. Through the textual transposition of Che Guevara’s diaristic rendition of his trajectory through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, “Reunión” also records the historical meeting of revolutionaries. Meanings produced through displacements develop also in the closing story of the volume, “El otro cielo,” in which Paris and Buenos Aires are seamlessly intertwined in the character’s experience. Displacement functions as an organizing thread through Todos los fuegos el fuego; transfers and reverberations in the stories generate disquieting tensions that reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and the human condition.

The chapter argues that, with the publication of Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) in 1929, Roberto Arlt produced the first major Argentine novel whose ideological topics, ways of representation, systems of characters, and spatial inventions, far from finding their place among the national literary traditions, establish a dialogue with the great novels of metropolitan modernity of the time: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928). The modern city, the cosmopolitan city of urban mixture and modernization, is the grand stage for the aesthetic, ideological, cultural, and social conflict in Arlt’s literature. In this sense, as a writer, journalist, and playwright, Arlt is the one who best expresses the disruption of an order and the instability implied by the impact of modernization on Argentine culture in the early twentieth century.

By 1948, President Perón’s first economic program was yielding results and enjoying broad political and social support while strengthening an expanding state infrastructure. The consolidation of this nationalist and anti-liberal model had an impact on cultural production, particularly on an expanded literary field. Between 1948 and 1949 several works that became canonical were published, offering a diversity of perspectives on the debates that crisscrossed Argentine culture: the novels Adán Buenos Ayres (Leopoldo Marechal), El túnel (Ernesto Sábato), the essay Muerte y transfiguración de Martín Fierro (Ezequiel Martínez Estrada) and in the short-story collection El Aleph (Jorge Luis Borges). Differences arose not only out of divergent political positions but also, and perhaps more poignantly, out of the disparate conceptual frameworks around which intellectual debates took place: ideas of order and chaos, organization and entropy, community and disorder. Terms like “pueblo” and “popular” became essential and unavoidable to discuss fiction, literary language, the role of literature, and literary institutions that grouped writers.

This chapter analyzes the works of brother and sister Lucio Victorio Mansilla and Eduarda Mansilla, two fundamental figures in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Argentina, whose personal trajectories took them to Europe and the United States. Journalist, military man, and politician Lucio penned what can be considered the first ethnographic record of the Indigenous peoples of the Pampas; Eduardo was an accomplished novelist, travel writer, journalist, and musician who published in both Spanish and French. In this chapter the work of both siblings is read together. It takes into account the centrality of Lucio in the field of Argentinean literature and proposes that Eduarda illuminates different areas of the cultural intellectual life of nineteenth-century Argentina. Focus is on Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla and two novels by Eduarda Mansilla – El médico de San Luis (1860) and Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, published in French in 1869 and translated by Lucio – to reflect on the relationship between narration and the state, practices of everyday life, sociability, and family stories, as well as their circulation and consecration mechanisms.

In 1957 Rodolfo Walsh published the first edition of Operación masacre, a thoroughly researched book that denounces the execution by the military régime of a group of civilians a year before. In the next few decades until his disappearance in 1977, Walsh would publish new expanded versions of the text that included documents that supported the veracity of his own investigation. Operación masacre is a rare case of where a political event engenders a new type of writing designed to tell the very story that has inspired it, and in so doing creates a new literary genre. In Operación Masacre, we read a text that is both a new writing and a new genre, produced in the urgency of political intervention, and with the desire to affect it and interpellate it. The relationship between literature and politics is dramatized in this text, as it will soon be dramatized in Walsh´s life. This chapter addresses the constitution of nonfiction in Walsh´s text, the relationships with his other works, and his legacy after his kidnapping and ensuing disappearance in 1977 at the hands of the military dictatorship.

This chapter proposes to trace a map following the economic and literary route of money in Latin America between 1890 and 1930, in tune with what was happening in Western Europe and the United States. Money, with all its ubiquity between real and virtual financial capital, had an expansive and global power that altered local imagination: In Latin America, due to both literary and economic forces, we see the proliferation of what this chapter dubs “fictions of money.” Furthermore, it focuses on the Argentine, Brazilian, and Guatemalan cases, given the striking publication of financial novels immediately after the economic crises provoked by fluctuations in the stock market and unbridled speculation, which served to process the actual circulation of money and to negotiate the social experience related to it.