Argentine Literature is one of the most prolific, relevant and influential in the whole Spanish speaking world.
Argentine literature began around 1550 with the work of Matías Rojas de Oquendo and Pedro González de Prado, who wrote prose and poetry. They were partly inspired by oral aboriginal poetry. A symbiosis emerged between the aboriginal and Spanish traditions, creating a distinct literature, geographically limited to the Argentine both and central regions. During the 17th century, Argentine baroque literature was poor in comparison with that from Europe and some other parts of the New World.
As in the rest of the continent, strong feelings of emancipation from Spain were present in Argentina. Before independence, some neoclassical authors produced numerous works related with this revolutionary spirit but still under the paradoxical Spanish domain. Argentina's true break with Spanish tradition was manifested in literature through the adoption of French romanticism as a model, postulating the return to popular sources adn the medieval.
In the middle of the 19th-century huistorical novels were set during the dark year of 1840 which fixed fictional characters with historical characters; as well as literary works from the opposition were produced. Poetry lessened in combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental. Poetry took two main pathways: the first, current, is know as nativist poetry and became a literacy tradition. The second, known as poesia gauchesca developed in parallel as a par of the generation's understanding of national identity.
Generation of 1880
The generation of 1880 emphasized the European color and cultural supremacy of Buenos Aires. The migratory current of mixed ethnicity accentuated the change of the big village for the cosmopolitan metropolis. Narrative works oscillated between social issues and folk literature. The predominant tendency was Realism, but naturalism was also an important tendency towards the end of the century.
Generation of 37'
The Generation of 1937 centers on poetry, where it developed the descriptive, nostalgic and meditative in the work, while fiction writers subscribed to idealism and magic realism with some urban touches, as well as folk literature.
In 1950, another milestone arose: the New Humanism, a response to World War II and its aftermath. On one end are the avant-gardists, on the other the existentialists. Further away are those who reconcile both tendencies with a regionalist influence. The 1970's were a dark period for the intellectual creation in Argentina. The epoch i characterized by the exile or death of major writers. The remaining literacy journalists, veiled their opinions in their work. Some journalists, poets, fiction writers, and essayists stood out among the vicissitudes and renewed the field of ethical and aesthetical ideas.
Reference
Wikipedia. (2015, November 23). Argentine Literature retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_literature
The history of Argentina is fractured, as it was originally largely ignored by the conquering Spaniards, who favored the more gold-rich areas of Bolivia and Peru to the north. This benign neglect, in fact, allowed Argentines to develop a bit more unfettered by Madrid and their neighbors, and was one fo the reasons for the larger immigration into Argentina from many other parts of the world.
Argetina is said to be an European country in the wrong continent. Its is also said to be like Texas, only with European cowboys. It is, in fact, both. Sophisticated "Portenos" (what people from Buenos Aires call themselves) are continental in attitude, dress, airs, speech, even blood. most of them are descendants of immigrants from the continent, and continue to speak German, Italian, or French, or the Lunfardo, the unique form of of Spanish that is spoken in Argentina today (as result of the influence of many European languages).
Though Argentina is nominally a federal democratic republic with a bicameral legislature, a president, and a judicial system, the government authority is still heavily influenced by powerful interests and the military. The political atmosphere has always been stormy, and although the country has since its independence from time to time been run by military juntas and dictators (the most famous— or infamous, depending upon your perspective— being Juan Peron, the key Latin American problems of wealth redistribution and land reform in Argentina have mainly taken the form of urban struggles between workers and the ruling business elite.
Argentina is divided into seven geographical regions, it is also a mega diverse country hosting one og the greatest ecosystem varieties in the world: 15 continental zones, 3 oceanic zones, and the Antarctic region are all represented in its territory. Although the most populated areas are generally temperate, Argentina has an exceptional climate diversity, ranging from subtropical in the north to sub-polar in the far south.
Reference
Foster, D. (2002). The Global Etiquette Guide to Mexico and Latin America. (pp. 162-182). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wikipedia. (2016, May 25). Argentina retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works have become classics of 20th-century world literature. Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of Buenos Aires, the setting of some of his works. His family, which had been notable in Argentine history, included British ancestry, and he learned English before Spanish. In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Borges was taken by his family to Geneva, where he learned French and German and received his B.A. from the Collège de Genève. Leaving there in 1919, the family spent a year on Majorca and a year in mainland Spain, where he joined the young writers of the Ultraist movement.
Returning to Buenos Aires in 1921, Borges rediscovered his native city and began to sing of its beauty in poems that imaginatively reconstructed its past and present. He is also credited with establishing the Ultraist movement in South America, though he later repudiated it. During his next phase, Borges gradually overcame his shyness in creating pure fiction. At first he preferred to retell the lives of more or less infamous men, as in the sketches of his A Universal History of Infamy, 1935.
In 1938, the year his father died, Borges suffered a severe head wound and subsequent blood poisoning, which left him near death, bereft of speech, and fearing for his sanity. This experience appears to have freed in him the deepest forces of creation. In the next eight years he produced his best fantastic stories, those later collected in Fictions, and the volume of English translations titled The Aleph and Other Stories. During this time, he and another writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, jointly wrote detective stories under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq (combining ancestral names of the two writers' families), which were published in 1942 as Six problems for Don Isidro Parodi. The works of this period revealed for the first time Borges’s entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the real one, with its own language and systems of symbols.
Reference
Image retrieved from Google Images https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/24/51/cc/2451cc07e5bd6a5cb6ae603b378ee1f8.jpg
Rodriguez Monegal, E. (n.d). Jorge Luis Borges. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Jorge-Luis-Borges
Adolfo Bioy Casares (1915-1999) was an Argentine writer adn editor, known both for his own work and for his collaborations with Jorge Luis Borges. His elegantly constructed works are oriented toward metaphysical possibilities and employ the fantastic to achieve their meanings.
Image retrieved from Google Images http://revoluciontrespuntocero.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Adolfo-Bioy-Casares-2.jpg
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d). Adolfo Bioy Casares. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolfo-Bioy-Casares
Carlos Gamerro is an Argentinean novelist, critic, and translator. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. Gamero has published six works of fiction, as well as works for criticism, and scripts for film and stage. In addition, he has translated works of William Shakespeare, W.H. Auden and Harold Bloom into Spanish.
Image retrieved from Google Images http://audiovideotecaba.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Carlos-Gamerro.jpg
Wikipedia. (2016, May 13). Carlos Gamerro retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Gamerro
Julio Cortazar, pseudonym, Julio Denis was an Argentine novelist and short-story writer who combined existential questioning with experimental writing techniques in his works. Bestiary his first short-story collection, was published the year he moved to Paris, and act motivated by dissatisfaction with the government of Juan Peron and what he saw as the general stagnation of the Argentine middle class. The metaphysical anguish that he feels in his search for artistic perfection and in his failure to come to grips with the passage of time, coupled with his rejection of 20th-century values, was among Cortázar’s central preoccupations.
Image retrieved from Google Images http://cde.peru.com/ima/0/0/9/0/1/901477/628x353/julio-cortazar.jpg
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d). Julio Cortazar. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/biography/Julio-Cortazar