Nightmares of the lettered city : banditry and literature in Latin America, 1816-1929 / Juan Pablo Dabove.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dabove, Juan Pablo, author.

Series:

Illuminations (Pittsburgh, Pa.)

Illuminations : cultural formations of the Americas

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Latin American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Latin American literature.

Brigands and robbers in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (392 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2007]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study of the popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry, and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization and formation of the Latin American nation-state. Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered City focuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditry in Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Do-a Barbara, Os Sert›es, and Martin Fierro, among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and often contradictory political agendas of the literary elite in their portrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled "banditry."Banditry has haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a cultural trope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire and anxiety (a "nightmare"), and Dabove isolates three main representational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other, a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them by various sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers the bandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case, rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sector or faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, in certain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violence that the nation state has to suppress as a historical force and simultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherence and actual sovereignty. As Dabove convincingly demonstrates, the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to our understanding of the development of the Latin American nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Contents:

El periquillo sarniento : banditry as the non plus ultra

Facundo : banditry and the state as nomadic war machine

El chacho : banditry and allegories of legitimation

O cabelleira : cangaceiros, sacarocracy, and the invention of a national tradition

El zarco : banditry and foundational allegories for the nation-state

Criminology : banditry as the wound of history

Astucia : banditry and insurgent utopia

Zárate : banditry, nation, and the experience of the limits

Martín Fierro : banditry and the frontiers of the voice

Juan Moreira : the gaucho malo as unpopular hero

Alma gaucha : the gaucho outlaw and the leviathan

Los bandidos de Ría Frío : banditry, the criminal state, and the critique of Porfirian illusions

Os sertões : original banditry and the crimes of nations

La guerra gaucha : bandit and founding father in the epic of the nation-state

Los de abajo : the feast, the bandit gang, the bola (revolution and its metaphors)

Cesarismo democrático : banditry and the necessary gendarme (the shadow of the Caudillo I)

Doña Bárbara : banditry and the illusions of modernity (the shadow of the Caudillo II).

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-369) and index.

ISBN:

9780822973195

0822973197

OCLC:

891395101