Novelist, scholar, journalist, statesman, and leading member of Chile's "Generation of 1842"--an intellectual movement so named for the founding of the National University--Jose Victorino Lastarria (1811-1888) lived his life at the forefront of nineteenth-century Chilean and Spanish American culture, literature, and politics. Recuerdos Literarios (or Literary Memoirs) is his masterpiece, encompassing the candid memories of a tireless activist, both the creative and critical sensibilities of an influential Latin American early modernist, and an eyewitness account of the development of Chilean...

Between 1980 and World War II, South America experienced the unsettling first stages of modernization. During this half-century of economic, political, and social change, the armies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru underwent a process of professionalization as European military missions transformed their officer corps into copies of French and German officialdom. In so doing, European officers inculcated their ideals and values, thought and self-perception their professionalism in countries historically vulnerable to militarism.Based mainly on a comprehensive examination of European and...

Although everything in this imaginative and compelling biography of the martyred Chilean President Salvador Allende is solidly based on fact, it is cast in the form of a novel by the author, who was a close friend and longtime colleague of Allende. 'It is less a novel than a stirring national epic for a land so long at the mercy of outsiders, without proprietary rights over its history. Alegria recaptures it for Chile. Allende's story as told by Alegria is exciting and often inspiring.' The Times Literary Supplement

Although everything in this imaginative and compelling biography of the martyred Chilean President, Salvador Allende, is solidly based on fact, it is cast in the form of a novel by the author, who was a close friend and longtime colleague of Allende.

Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. "Collisions with History" shows how fictional histories of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions. These collisions occurred only because of El Boom, thus making Latin America s greatest literary movement a historical phenomenon as well. Frederick M. Nunn discusses the cataclysmic view...