The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South Book

This book maps the conflicting constructions of the space of the South and their centrality to Argentine discourses of identity, nation, and self-fashioning in the nineteenth-century writing of Francis Bond Head, Sarmiento, Mansilla, Darwin, Francisco P. Moreno, and W. H. Hudson. The different representations of the South as empty, barbaric, primitive, violent, autochthonous, or full of potential are tenets of an Argentine liberal ideology that seeks to construct a Europeanized civilized nation. Dr. Jagoe traces the manner in which these texts have been explored, challenged, and recast by twentieth-century fiction writers Borges, Piglia, and Aira. This ambitious work foregrounds the dialectical relationship between the intensely experiential narrations of the South and Argentine political history and traces a literary journey that links the politics of dictatorship, democracy, genocide, and collective memory with the ideologies of nationalism, romanticism, positivism, imperialism, and modernism. Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.